D:DoC has not been verified as not coming to the Americas. It is being tested in the "others" market first.

I'm sure there is a strategy behind the whole thing. I mean, you can't just say "What's going through Reggie et. al.'s heads?"

Anyways, I am happy with what i have. I really don't have anything to complain about. I think some people just overreact.

You got Brawl like 4 months earlier. Case closed.

I'd rather see Nintendo of America produce more games rather than just localize.

You make some fair points, but that's not what the data are arguing. This isn't a pissing contest between who's getting screwed over more: America or Europe? The data tell us that Nintendo of America in particular has been getting worse and worse about localizing games as time goes on.

I direct your attention to the graph, and the alarming slope it's showing. I also direct your attention to the lack of any method to the madness: Donkey Kong Barrel Blast gets localized, but Soma Bringer does not. ASH has been translated, rated, and finished for six months, but it has no release date.

Fatal Frame IV was funded by Nintendo, and Tecmo rightfully refers all publication questions to Nintendo, but Nintendo of America representatives didn't even know what the game was at E3, and now Reggie's telling people to talk to "the publisher" (they are!).

The post has a simple message; for whatever reason, Nintendo of America's been doing less and less localizing lately. This applies to their core and expanded audience games (cooking navi is finally being released here...two years after it came out in Japan. Several "training" games that have been available in Europe for a while are still MIA). Disaster is an American-oriented game, set in America, with American voice actors, and yet it won't be localized until NoA sees how it does in Europe!

Something's rotten in the state of Washington, and while it's far from the end of the world, I for one find it annoying. Nintendo's giving us new, experimental IPs left and right for the past few years, but Western audiences remain ignorant about them because NoA (and NoE) don't bring them over.

The link and most of your thread is just gibberish (nospacebetweenwords) so I wasn't able to read it.

Still, from the comments and what I could read, I have this to say.


If localizing the game isn't profitable considering work hours, shipping prices and such, why should they do it? This is Nintendo we're talking about - profit is their main goal, and they never (knowingly) make a bad business.

I can't see how that is shocking news.

Japan is where much of the software originates not neading any type of modification to release or dramatic increase in shipping.  That would be why many are released only there.That's why i never said anything about Japan because i thought it was quite superfluous to mention. 

As the American economy declines I would expect to see a far greater focus on the European market.  Every copy that is sold there is sold at a much larger profit (approximately 2x more i believe) than here given our very devalued dollar which means less risk. Do you have anything intelligent to add the converstation?

it's like back in the day when europe got Terranigma for the SNES and we didn't get it.

Hmm, must be something wrong with your browser, although it's odd that it only applies to the OP. Ah well, whachagonnado?

And yes, you're right that if localization isn't profitable, Nintendo won't do it. But I can't see how we can argue that localizing many of the titles they're passing up would be unprofitable.

Two examples: Fatal Frame has traditionally garnered much more than half of its audience outside of Japan; the 70k or so it's done in Japan is the second-highest any installment has ever sold in that country, but the average title in the series grosses over a quarter of a million. Not only is there nothing to indicate that it won't be well received here in the West, the publisher had to have expected the majority of sales to occur in the U.S. (as well as Europe). So why does NoA act like the game doesn't exist (at E3, literally)?

Second example: Disaster Day of Crisis is clearly aimed at Western audiences. Again, everything about it is American, and it's obviously going for the Hollywood Blockbuster feel. While there is, of course, the chance that the sales will be so poor that it'll fail to recoup those expenses, I personally doubt that will be the case. And if it seemed like it would be, why didn't Nintendo pull the plug earlier?

But these are specific games, and not what the post was getting at. The question it posed is "why are fewer and fewer games being localized?" I personally can't find any answer to that. There's nothing in the latest Nintendo games that makes me think that they're generally less ripe for localization than Nintendo games of years past. It's not like Nintendo's suddenly increased the number of Japan-centric games they're producing, certainly not at such a dramatic rate. And, as the post pointed out, there doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern to what is localized: Magical Starsign didn't have "hit" written all over it, but that got ported over while the higher-pedigree Soma Bringer doesn't seem like it's going to.

I freely concede that Nintendo's business sense is leagues above my own, and perhaps they're right and I'm wrong about the value in localization. But not only do I object as a gamer, but more importantly I object because there's nothing I reead in any of the tea leaves that justifies this new recalcitrance. Perhaps I'm missing something economic, but it seems to me that the cost of localization would not be so high that selling a few tens of thousands of copies of, say, Band Bros. would not be profitable, or that the audience isn't large enough to sell that amount. Nor do I see NoA's schedule suddenly being so swamped that releasing a few more games would lead to cannibalization. I just don't understand what's going on in NoA, although I know for certain that something's changed recently, and I'm looking for someone to help explain it to me.

worse and worse... or better and better

Damn, that was an eye-opener! I used to like Reggie, but am officially pissed at him now :-S

Are Wiis region-free? If so, I'm making Disaster my first official import, ever.