Valve Contacted Japanese Developers To Bring Their Games To Steam

[Scoobes]

S.T.A.G.E. said:

zarx said:

S.T.A.G.E. said:

I'll see how well Dark Souls PC sells before I judge this prospect.

It's been amoung the top ten most played games on steam since release with a peak of over 11k simultanious players (some devs have said that the peak players on steam was arround 10% of their initial sales so arround 100k+ copies on Steam). And has been on the Steam best sellers list since it was available for preorder. Keep in mind the retail copies don't require Steam and it's available from the GFWL store etc as well. And I would say it's sold quite well considering the rather poor port and that it's 6 months late. 

 

I think that Recettear is probably more the kind of game you should be looking at. Which managed 100k copies in a few months thanks to heavy discounting and was hugely successful for the dev and first time localiser/publisher.

Yeah, but remember the Japanese games generally sell steadier on console because that is their known platform. If Japanese devs wanted these games on PC they would've done it ages ago. Theres obviously something stopping them from seeing it as an added bonus. Its kind of like Mass Effect, the numbers are weak on PC even though it performs the best. The 360's sales are a huge commercial source for the franchise, but even the PS3 who came late to the party outsold PC. Secondly, most of the Japanese games are better played with a gaming pad, which of course is optional on a PC. This helps the cause, but really what I need to see is how much it sells in all two months from launch. 100k is not enough in this generation and expectations will get worse in the future. If Newell tries to create a rapport between Steam and Japan, it's going to take quite a while as culturally the styles are quite different. Dark Souls made sense, because of games like the Witcher aesthetically, but the others beg me to question. We'll see and it might work, but only if its next gen when people can freshly open their eyes to the idea.

Have you got some sources for this?

We have no way of knowing the extent of PC sales for Mass Effect, especially considering a lot (some estimates suggest the majority) of PC sales are digital downloads.

Edit: Especially considering EA had this to say about the 1st week NPD numbers:

"We think the monthly NPD reports are a very poor indicator of the industry's performance given the proportion of digital sales – including digital downloads via Origin, DLC, mobile and social games and much more – that are not captured in their reports," John Reseburg of EA's corporate communications told Joystiq. "Taking these reports as an accurate snapshot of the industry today is a dangerous assumption."

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/04/13/mass-effect-3-sales-in-us-hit-1-3-million-during-launch-month/