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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The reason PS3 does not have the Japanese game support that PS2 did

ZenfoldorVGI made the comment in another forum that the reason he doesn't like and doesn't play his PS3 much is the lack of Japanese style games and JRPGs in particular.  With all the support the PS2 had on that front you would think it would be a no brainer that they would continue that trend but it hasn't really been the case yet, as Zen pointed out the PS3 has had mostly Western support and mostly FPS games and games like R&C:FToD and Uncharted.  It was an interesting point and made me think of why the support is lacking and from a Japanese dev's point of view I surmised these points in my theory:

  • There's only around 2 million PS3's sold in Japan, most dev teams shoot for profit and most want that goal of having a million seller, it's very hard to have a million seller with only 2 million systems in their market you would have to appeal to over half the PS3 owners.
  • Budget, the economy is going down a bit over there so they can't spend all their moeny on one game to have is look "next gen"
  • Risk, they can always come out with a game for the PS3 and then bring it to the states but the things that stand in their way is this, with the small market they have they might not make a huge profit off their game, then they spend a lot of money on translation, voice actors, and everything else that goes into making a game for another region and they might not have the money for that, or they do but they send it out and lose the profit they made in Japan cause it flopped in the NA and Europe.
Those are three big factors into making a successful game and the odds seemed to be stacked against the dev's at this point in time, I really want to see what these JRPG makers and Japanese dev's can do with PS3 and if they ever venture to 360 (or if MS throws enough money their way to make games for 360) it will be an interesting sight when it happens.  For now however there just needs to be more hardware sales there to warrent their risk.



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