I can 't not say anything about dragon quest as I said above there is no way Little King Story and Muramasa could of come out at the same time worldwide it is impossible also those games would not have sold anymore if releases at the same time because of weak maketing... Your theory only makes sense for bigger games  that have  money behind it... small game will always suffer no matter what....

You can go ahead and say the Japanese Market is still as strong as ever, but their gaming industry is no longer the force they once were. As to your previous post saying that Japan is the 2nd largest in a long line of vital markets, even the UK alone (which is of course counted among the E.U.) have surpassed Japan in overall sales.

So in the face of evidence, you are going to continue to assert that the Japanese gaming industry is shrinking?

The UK did in fact surpass Japan one [edit]year[/edit]. I'm fairly sure that Japan then re overtook it. Regardless, if you read my posts, you'll note that I said that the Japanese market was growing at about 70% of that of the Western market. So I agree that the Japanese market is becoming a smaller fraction of the total market. But that does not change the fact that it is growing very rapidly.

And yes, of course if we keep adding in countries together, then the Japanese market seems small. If we go by the breakdowns given in VGChartz
Others - population 5.6 billion - hundreds of countries
Americas - population approx 300 million? - about a dozen countries
Japan - population 120 million? - 1 country

And yet it still competes with these two regions

Look, I'm just trying to say that if they want more sales, simultaneous releases are the way to go. If you believe you are right, then we'll eventually know in the future whether their current business practices are working for them are not.

First off nearly any game can release in all regions simotaniously now adays.  The only reason they don't is if they are unsure of if they want to.  Muramasa and Little King's Story however were already being planned for international release before their main Japanese release.  Heck, Little King's Story released in Europe before Japan.  But then America and Japan had to wait 4 months for the game.  Why?  This is another reason why Japanese developers could speed up the process and have their games come out faster in other regions, because many times they already are planning to do it, yet it still takes 6-12 months for it to finally get to us.  And that leads to a loss of interest from the consumer, who will forget about that game and spend the money they were going to use on that game on something else over that 6-12 month period.

How many times have you heard of someone waiting for a perticular game to come out, only to buy something else instead because they're tired of waiting?  I don't know about you, but I heard about it all the time.  That happens more often to Japanese games because they have the long localization process to go through and Americans have the attention span of about 1-2 weeks.

All big games like FF, Mario, Zelda and GT must have simultaneos release or at least not more than one month after Jap release. SE (especially). Well not all jap dev are like that. Konami and Capcom already release how much simultaneos benefit them. MGS4, RE5, SFIV and new games like Tekken 6 and Bayonetta also had close release for all regions. Dont blame all Jap dev. Only some of them like Nintendo, Sony, and Square Enix dont have simultaneosu release for their games. Some Western dev also had late launch in Japan for example GTA series which is quite big in Japan.

It's funny how you blame Japan for not doing WW releases when they have to translate the game from Japanese to English but you fail to see that MOST games released by western developers dont get a WW release in Japan. Sometimes Japan has to wait 3-6months or more for a western developed game to be translated and released in Japan.

Talk about looking at only one side of the coin.

Im all for WW releases though and wish the majority of games were WW but its costly and theres a chance of x game bombing in X country could put the dev's company in the red. Not a good business move.

As we were saying in this thread, games from small developers or niche games like katamari is an exception since they obviously do better in Japan. As to say I'm not considering Western games, remember that we're talking about games that would obviously do well abroad. Games like katamari will no doubt get overlooked no matter how fast they are released in the West, and the same can be said about Western games being released in Japan. For sure titles that can be sold worldwide however, the longer they take to get it localized, the less sales they will make.

An example would be Gran Turismo 5, it is a title that will do well world wide. However if they take too long to get it localized for certain markets, the consumers may pick something else up during the time. Other games might not be as great, but it will chip away the hype by the time it releases (not to mention pockets).

You could say I'm only looking at one side of the coin, but for major publishers, shouldn't they be looking at both sides too.

Even weirder is how it take so long to localise for release in Europe. Why does the UK version of ACiT release over a week after the US version?