fooflexible on 26 June 2007
| mrstickball said: Yet pre-orders are higher for Oblivion than Trusty Bell. Western games don't sell as well in Japan as the West, we all know that. However, that doesn't prevent them from atleast selling at all. A few good examples would be Halo 1/2, Resistance, and GTA:SA. Halo 1/2 ended up selling around 70-80k units each, on a system that only sold 480k h/w units LTD. That's not a real bad number, IMO. R:FoM sold 126,000+ units thus far. Very good for a strongly Western FPS for the PS3 launch. Honestly, this number is excellent, considering the PS3 userbase. More than 10% of the PS3 owners right now have a copy of this game. GTA:SA hassold 372,000+ units. This pales in comparison to the Western numbers, but it's a Z-Rated game. It's blacklisted beyond belief. GTA3 also did 300k+. Very very good for games that always get moved to the back of the stores and have no displays. Gears of War is charging to the 70k mark in Japan as well. Not incredibly awesome, but again, considering the userbase, it's good. In another world, if the 360 was #1 in Japan, if the tier ratios were the same, the Western games would be doing incredibly well. Eventually, it just comes down to userbase: The 360 certainly has the most Western games in Japan, but they do poorly not because of the fact they're western, but because they're on a console with such abysmal hardware sales. With more 360 western fare such as Oblivion, Halo 3 and Mass Effect dropping this year, we could see one, or even all, of those titles break the 100k barrier in Japan - an impressive feat for a system that might have only 650k~700k h/w units sold by the end of the year. Just give it time before a Western dev puts a major franchise on the Wii, or a better-selling PS3. Games like Metal Gear, RE:4 are Western-centric, but sell well, so it's really not the style, it's probably the preception and translation, and hype. Everyone thinks that Western games don't sell so they aren't promoted. Really, this is only true with video games. American music artists regularly do well in Japan. There's an audience for Western games in Japan, I just don't think many people have taken the time to deal with translations, and attempting to really cater to the Japanese with a western game. I do, however feel that one of those 3 aforementioned 360 games should do very very well for it's userbase. What if Oblivion outsold the US's PS3 version (150k)? What if Mass Effect sold 150k? What if Halo 3 sold 150k? To me, those numbers would be phenominal. Look at the 360 market in Japan. Games like Rainbow Six:Vegas have certainly improved on other TPS games in Japan as of recent. GRAW 1 has sold maybe 13k. RSV is at twice that number in Japan, and climbing. |
Good call Mr.stickball, I'm getting tired of every western game in Japan simply being dismissed as if it will sell 2 copies(on the forum here.). Some of these titles made some good inroads and that should only continue.
