Recently, Spanish website Gamespek conducted an interview with the Spanish porting company BlitWorks. Selected translated comments posted to this NeoGAF thread suggest that the company’s boss, Tony Cabello, encourages fans to continue to ask Sega for ports of games, and welcome the opportunity to handle ports themselves.
A page detailing their portfolio can be seen on their official website, alongside the platforms they work on. Among their works, the Sega standouts are Jet Set Radio (Vita, PS3, Android, iOS, 360, PC) and Sonic CD (PC, 360, PS3.) A few years ago, BlitWorks approached Sega with working demos of Jet Set Radio, Sonic CD, and Shenmue, but apparently Sega had expressed interest in the first two.
They also mention that they used a certain “emulation trick” to make Jet Set Radio operable on the firmware versions that were the newest at the time, but the game ceased to be functional with later updates, such as on iOS8. The terms of BlitWorks’ contract apparently didn’t enable them to revisit the mobile ports to retool them and render them functional. Jet Set Radio is one of many games culled from Sega’s current mobile offerings in a sort of “quality assurance” initiative.
Those with a grasp of Spanish or who might otherwise be inclined to check out the interview for themselves can view it here.
In order to express your desire to see more games ported, consider such avenues as social media, gaming forums like NeoGAF, and even Sega’s own official forum. BlitWorks themselves notes that they are aware of activity on petition sites like change.org. Direct success is one matter (Kudos to this petition, and the announcement of Digimon Cyber Sleuth’s localization for the West and Brazil!) with regards to petitions. Petitions are a touchy subject since it’s easy to be jaded by them. Early signers don’t know if the initiative will be successful, there’s no guarantee that any one benchmark will provoke the desired response from a company, and some might feel the “track record” of petitions are not good enough to merit supporting the medium.
Let me say this regarding petitions: the point of a petition isn’t that you sign one predicting whether or not it’s going to be successful. You sign them as an expression of your association with a point of view expressed within the text. There are hardly any petitions that can guarantee any sort of immediate desired response – I don’t consider that a realistic or fair assessment of the purpose of a petition. No corporation will actively solicit the feedback of its connected audience on so many issues – in large part because it won’t be sufficiently representative either way of those who purchase a certain game, support a cause, etc..
At the least, there isn’t anything to say that the work of supporting a game’s localization, or any form of outreach to a game company, has to start and stop with a petition – always continue to keep talking! Make your voice heard. The odds of success on any one initiative may vary wildly, but the odds of a silent initiative are an absolute zero.