We know that PSO2 Meseta the foreign population on the JP servers is tiny when compared with the people playing the NA servers, however, hindsight is 20/20. Talking of 2020, enter Microsoft. A number of years back, Microsoft opens up Azure for gaming. While we don't know who approached who, it's very clear that there was an arrangement between the two businesses: Microsoft can fund the PSO2 localization job in exchange for SEGA utilizing and testing Microsoft's platform. The rest is history. SEGA didn't wait because they wanted to.

Granted, this is just a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt. Wait, if thats true, does this mean we can attribute PSO2 NA's authentic delay on Randy Pitchford!? Because I'm all for that! Wait what? I thought that sport funds have been stolen to finance Borderlands rather than the game I discovered, that's dumb.

It is a rumor, but Jeff Gertsmann was the person who talked about it, and he's not some random. Granted, he's not super influential in the gambling scene, but he is very much an experienced reporter and match reviewer, even though he is not a journalist; he's a lot of connections. Not very long after the announcement of PSO2 for its west in 2012, alot of downsizing happened for the western branches of SEGA, particularly SEGA of America. For some time SEGA needed to concentrate just on a few key franchises at the west, and it was only after SEGA of America was merged to Atlus USA at 2015 that things started to get much better.

There was no way they could have managed a huge online game such as PSO2 during those years, and even following the merge, they were busy with cheap Phantasy Star Online 2 Meseta not just localizing more matches from more franchises that they couldn't in the years before, but also they had been busy with improving their localization process so the western discharges could be closer to the JP releases. Even today in 2020 the current SEGA of America/Atlus USA would not have been able to deal with the whole PSO2 project independently (as we can see by the partnership between SEGA and Microsoft with MS hosting the servers and community along with support being outsourced to ESTSoft).