japanese needs to learn about simultaneous release

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

Exblackman said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

swyggi said:

Most constant sales come from appeal.  If someone wants a game, then they will get it no matter what.  If they are riding on hype (newcomers to a game generally fit in this category), then they were swept by dogma's fury.  "Everybody is so eager to get this game! It has to be good!"

 

No they don't.  In America, the most consistent sales comes from hype.  And there's 2 major drivers of that hype: 1) Word of Mouth and 2) Marketing.

Since most games don't get the type of marketing a major release such as Halo, GTA, Uncharted, Mario, Zelda, etc get, they have to go for the word of mouth hype.  If you stall a games localization for many months or a year, it loses that hype and people move on to another game.

Look at the sales for recent games like Muramasa, Little King's Story or like I stated in a previous post, Dragon Quest.  These games took close to a year to be localized from their Japanese counterparts and had little to no marketing outside of word of mouth (and some limited online advertising for Muramasa).  As a result, they're selling/have sold mildly (and in the case of Dragon Quest, horribly).

I can 't not say anything about dragon quest as I said above there is no way Little King Story and Muramasa could of come out at the same time worldwide it is impossible also those games would not have sold anymore if releases at the same time because of weak maketing... Your theory only makes sense for bigger games  that have  money behind it... small game will always suffer no matter what....

First off nearly any game can release in all regions simotaniously now adays.  The only reason they don't is if they are unsure of if they want to.  Muramasa and Little King's Story however were already being planned for international release before their main Japanese release.  Heck, Little King's Story released in Europe before Japan.  But then America and Japan had to wait 4 months for the game.  Why?  This is another reason why Japanese developers could speed up the process and have their games come out faster in other regions, because many times they already are planning to do it, yet it still takes 6-12 months for it to finally get to us.  And that leads to a loss of interest from the consumer, who will forget about that game and spend the money they were going to use on that game on something else over that 6-12 month period.

How many times have you heard of someone waiting for a perticular game to come out, only to buy something else instead because they're tired of waiting?  I don't know about you, but I heard about it all the time.  That happens more often to Japanese games because they have the long localization process to go through and Americans have the attention span of about 1-2 weeks.