| nofingershaha said: Perhaps the biggest gripe about Western game companies is that they take forever to localize their products for the Japanese market. Companies like EA and Activision don't realize that the longer time it takes them to localize their game after it releases in the West, the less we care about them as the hype dies down. Take GTA3 for instance, it took Rockstar 2 years to localize that game to the Japanese audience. The result of that long delay cost Rockstar over a million in sales due to the fact by that point the Japanese market was all geared up for the next generation of consoles. When we look at the world wide market for the video game industry, Japan is the 2nd largest in the long line of vital markets for this industry. From a business standpoint, this doesn't make much sense for these companies to continue these practices when Japanese publishers are producing and making games better than they are. Of course not all Japanese developers and publishers are like this. Hideo Kojima was smart enough to release MGS4 simultaneously worldwide. Of course this is because of the popularity of MGS franchise in the West. If this was Katamari, they can take all the time they want. However, for sure titles like Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo which will do well in the West, taking time to localize it after releasing it in a market that has shrunken so much over the years like Japan, it just does not make much sense. (I'm sorry, I can't satirise this paragraph. there are no western devs that have simultaneous launches, and the Japanese market is quite clearly growing at about 70% the rate of the American market) Now of course I'm not saying some of these titles won't sell unless they are released simultaneously, but life time sales will be compromised at some point. |
Repeat after me
"The world does not revolve around the western world."
