Last Story being released in Australia...Nintendo continues to crap on their most dedicated fans!!!

[mike_intellivision]

RolStoppable said:

mike_intellivision said:
The question is not why did NoA not release it here. The question is why did NoE release it.
According to a certain website, Xenoblade has sold 95k copies in EMEAA in eight weeks of release.
That is less than 5M euros of revenue (not profit, gross revenue) from which translation, preparation, production, shipping, and packaging will have to be paid.
For comparison, Just Dance 3 sold 120k copies in the Americas in its first week of release.

Mike from Morgantown

PS -- Yes, I want to play this game too. But economics say it is not as big a deal to most people as people here are making it out to be.

If you only look at it in revenue terms for the game itself, then you would be right.

But this is one of those titles that help to keep your passionate customers being passionate. Having them is the most powerful marketing tool for a company, because it is not only free advertising, but more effective too. Making decisions that make you lose passionate customers is not good, but making decisions that turn these customers into advocates against your products is even worse. The impact of not releasing Xenoblade and others in America could go far beyond pure revenue numbers for these games.

Xenoblade and The Last Story certainly aren't comparable to the likes of Disaster: Day of Crisis and Excitebots. The latter two are pretty forgettable, but those JRPGs are among the best the genre had to offer in the last five years, so losing out on these games is actually going to piss people off and casts huge doubts on Nintendo's promise of being more comitted to the hardcore gamer in the future.

Rol -- You make a really good point. Essentially, to me your point appears to be that NoE is thinking long-term while NoA is thinking today.  Thus NoE will take a bit of a hit to ensure people will be buying their consoles while NoA does not want to do that.

And given the fact that translations already exist in English, the cost of bringing this to North America would be even less for NoA. (And other languages have also been done if you were going to release outside of US and most of Canada).

Personally, I wonder what NoA has up their sleeve for 2012 for North America on the Wii. Because it could get really really dry after the holidays.  (The same goes for NCL in Japan and NoE in Europe)

Mike from Morgantown