Steam has been getting an increasing number of Japanese titles like Recettear from Carpe Fulgur to most recently a port of ClaDun x2 from NIS America. Marvelous AQL will join the Steam train with Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy, which is slated for release on September 27.

"As I understand it, Valve got in touch with us! They’re keen on giving their users great options on their service and they contacted several Japanese publishers," Marvelous AQL producer Esteban Jose Salazar said to Siliconera. "I was actually hired on after MAQL had decided which game to publish. My first day they told me we’d be doing Half-Minute Hero on Steam and my grin was about a foot wide. I’m a huge fan of both.  Valve has made it so easy for us to bring the game to Steam with their constant support and amazing publishing tools.  Running development of a game in two languages (English and Japanese) can cause major headaches, but Valve was always prompt and professional in helping us out."

Xseed has said Half-Minute Hero was one of their lowest selling titles. That was disappointing news to hear since Half-Minute Hero is stellar with a fantastic localization. There’s one particular scene in the Hero 30 storyline players won’t forget. Salazar believes Steam can give Half-Minute Hero a wider audience. "[Steam] gives us instant visibility without having to worry about an ad campaign and shelf space. In addition, we can be flexible on the price. While we might have to charge more for a disc-based version, with digital distribution we can offer the game at a price that users consider fair."

Marvelous AQL has a long list of titles they could bring to Steam like Luminous Arc 3,No More Heroes, and Grand Knights History. I asked Salazar what’s next for Marvelous AQL and Steam? Will we see original games made for PC? Ports of games that didn’t get localized?

"At this point, we are considering our best options. The PC is a killer platform, Steam is a dynamite service, and as long as I’m here I’ll be championing both for our games, old or new.  The best things you can do to see more games from us on Steam is pick up this game and let us know you are interested in others.  I can’t give you any specific hints, but if the game sells reasonably well, I personally would like to see us doing something *grand* on the PC. I think others would too, but first I have to show my bosses it’s a lucrative platform."

 http://www.siliconera.com/2012/09/07/valve-contacted-japanese-developers-to-bring-their-games-to-steam/

If you have a suggestion for Marvelous AQL’s Steam lineup you can tweet them at @HalfMinuteHero.

Really good move from Valve

Brilliant move by Valve and generally positive for both Valve and the Japanese developers... and actually consumers too. Valve get more games on Steam and the Japanese developers can widen their audience with decreased risk.

And we get more games to play!

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

This could be amazing. NIS? XSeed?

Bring Atlus and tri-Ace and there goes most of
My reasons for owning a console.

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.

I think the lack of PC releases for Japanese games has more to do with the fact that PC gaming just isn't a thing in Japan. Like that producer at FROM said, they weren't even aware that people played games on PC until they heard about the petition.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the PC would become the primary market for for Japanese developers. But there is clearly a market there, and there are more and more Japanese games comming to Steam/PC. From the Ys games to Reccetear, Dark Souls, Binary Domain, and most Capcom games (except the one which probably would have sold the best Dragons Dogma for some reason). And more sales for these games can't be a bad thing. 

Also keep in mind we are talking about publisher like Marvelous here which has never had a million seller. And Dark Souls 360 only did arround 200k units in it's first month for comparison. 

We can't really know how the PC versions of games like Mass Effect do as we don't really have the data. There is no tracking of digital sales and VGChartz's tracking of PC sales has been shown to be way off whenever publishers release numbers, they basically don't actually track most of Europe which is where PC games often outsell the console versions according to some publishers. 

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/

that's good for people that have steam. If I had a gaming PC,I'd get a steam account.

this is a good way of expanding steam to new audiences and may stop Japan's gaming audience from declining.
I like what valve have added to steam, recently (steam greenlight etc.) It's cool