Shadowfang12
Member
I live in the US and am extremely aggravated by the amount of games that are only being released in Japan.
Is it just because the companies don't think their game will sell well?
Do they not even want to take the time?
I'm glad that companies like Aksys,Atlus,and Falcom(for bringing the YS games to the psp) but I can't believe the amount of games that I'm missing.
I...think that I'm goint to cry.
Quig
Member
It is because their are more developers in Japan, and the U.S. market does not show an interest in every game that is over there. Most of the popular ones come over as well as ones that are able to fit into the 'western interest.'
This question has been echoed for a long time by gamers, but sadly the publishers in the States do not want to take the risk and lose money on their investment.
XSEED brought the latest Ys games out.
CaveShooterFan
Member
Thanks to Aksys, the impossible became possible... Deathsmiles came to the US.
Now I have hope Muchi Muchi Pork/ Pink Sweets and other Cave shooters will follow.
Students of the Round is nice too. Niche games don't have to be forgotten.
Magna_Mixalis
JERK-sama
On the flip side, there are a number of US games that never see the light of day in Japan. I was in Japan during the original XBOX era and there was a reason I was able to pick up a brand new one (with two games included; Halo and Project Gotham) in stores for 4000 yen...the few stores that actually carried XBOX stuff would have maybe 10 games available, if that. Think the PSP section at Walmart...
Shadowfang12
Member
Quig said:
It is because their are more developers in Japan, and the U.S. market does not show an interest in every game that is over there. Most of the popular ones come over as well as ones that are able to fit into the 'western interest.'This question has been echoed for a long time by gamers, but sadly the publishers in the States do not want to take the risk and lose money on their investment.
XSEED brought the latest Ys games out.
Well technically Falcom and XSEED brought YS psp to the US so technically we were both right.
And thank you for your insight.
Shadowfang12 said:
Well technically Falcom and XSEED brought YS psp to the US so technically we were both right.
And thank you for your insight.
Falcom developed and published the game in Japan. XSEED published it in the US. Falcom only "brought the game to the US" in the sense that they sold the US publishing rights to XSEED.
Yukito
Member
Yeah, I would love nothing more than to get JP games over here too. Currently, I have....
7 import disc based games because at one point or another, there was loss of hope on some of these games ever hitting US shores. I have Yakuza 3, back when it came out only in Japan and Sega was not caring about releasing it, Yaluza 4, because with the lack of content in 3, I wanted the uncut if 4 came out over here, Katamari tribute, because the gameplay is easy, and I didn't really want to wait longer....I was bored those months...... demons Souls, which wasn't listed for a release until a few months after my platinum, Another Century's Episode R, which is not, and won't ever come here, Gundam 0081, playing that now, won't ever come here, and Toro! Let's Party! Which, since Toro has no US fanbase, will never come here.
I would love to import the RPGs and such that Japan has.....same with Visual Novels, but those kind of games are more reliant on text than anything else. I cannot play games if they are in Japanese telling me what to do next, or without knowing the story when the game's main focus IS the story. It just plain sucks.
Anywho, it is why I am in such support of getting Visual Novels over here. Seems those are coming out more than anything in Japan currently. At some point or another, Visual Novels are all localizers will have TO localize from Japan, and well, got to show them support that those are welcomed over here. People say Japan has lost it, but that is far from true. I still see their games to have some great story telling, great characters, and fun gameplay, and it sucks so many companies are pulling the "Let's leave them in Japan, because we won't see 3m sales outside of Japan" card. I support every good JRG developer, and would the same for any Visual Novel dev/localizer as well, if I was just given the chance. It isn't like we got much choices this gen outside of handhelds. :(
Snow
Member
Yukito said:
Yeah, I would love nothing more than to get JP games over here too. Currently, I have....7 import disc based games because at one point or another, there was loss of hope on some of these games ever hitting US shores. I have Yakuza 3, back when it came out only in Japan and Sega was not caring about releasing it, Yaluza 4, because with the lack of content in 3, I wanted the uncut if 4 came out over here, Katamari tribute, because the gameplay is easy, and I didn't really want to wait longer....I was bored those months...... demons Souls, which wasn't listed for a release until a few months after my platinum, Another Century's Episode R, which is not, and won't ever come here, Gundam 0081, playing that now, won't ever come here, and Toro! Let's Party! Which, since Toro has no US fanbase, will never come here.
I would love to import the RPGs and such that Japan has.....same with Visual Novels, but those kind of games are more reliant on text than anything else. I cannot play games if they are in Japanese telling me what to do next, or without knowing the story when the game's main focus IS the story. It just plain sucks.
Anywho, it is why I am in such support of getting Visual Novels over here. Seems those are coming out more than anything in Japan currently. At some point or another, Visual Novels are all localizers will have TO localize from Japan, and well, got to show them support that those are welcomed over here. People say Japan has lost it, but that is far from true. I still see their games to have some great story telling, great characters, and fun gameplay, and it sucks so many companies are pulling the "Let's leave them in Japan, because we won't see 3m sales outside of Japan" card. I support every good JRG developer, and would the same for any Visual Novel dev/localizer as well, if I was just given the chance. It isn't like we got much choices this gen outside of handhelds. :(
The future with visual novels localized in NA seems so bleak... But then again, I'm still in support of getting a vn to be brought over. There's SOOO much psp and hd console visual novels that I want to play, as well as some jrpg's *coughtalescough* but sadly, I can't read text and I don't know enough to actually understand everything they say even if they're voiced. I pray that we WILL eventually get one over that has a established fan-base to test things out. Like Umineko ps3 =(. Da-Capo. Chaos; Head(?).
Xelloss
Member
I guess the one thing I dont understand, is why no Japanese devs simply subtitle their games/do an english translation. Especially for titles that have almost no chance of having the rights bought by a western publisher. In any case, there are plenty of good arguments that being super import-friendly and increasing the western fanbase would increase chances of getting a proper publisher, and increase sales.
Yet, you never really see it.
To me its so strange because Japanese games seem to tend to sell less copies at a higher price, on average, than western games. Especially VNs. So even games that only had a thousand western fans would still produce profits far in excess of costs for getting a translation done.
In the age of the Internet, incorporating a translation and distributing is mostly a simple matter of having the will/desire to do so. Foreign devs in general seem to be leaving a lot of money on the table.
I guess the one thing I dont understand, is why no Japanese devs simply subtitle their games/do an english translation. Especially for titles that have almost no chance of having the rights bought by a western publisher. In any case, there are plenty of good arguments that being super import-friendly and increasing the western fanbase would increase chances of getting a proper publisher, and increase sales.
I believe the reason for this is because quite frankly, the Japanese do not speak English like we do. While the Japanese are taught English in school, most of them do not have a general grasp of how the language actually works. There are very few Japanese as far as I know of who can actually speak English fluently (kind of like how there are very few Americans who can actually speak and understand Japanese correctly). That's why everyone makes fun of them by saying they speak "Engrish" because they butcher the language pretty bad. A lot of English words in Japanese don't even keep the same meaning as they do over here. For example, "baggu" which is used for bag is okay because the translation is pretty close to a general bag like a bag of groceries. However, bring up "handubaggu" Americans may think it means handbag, which is simply not true. In Japan it means purse! So there's a big disconnect right there.
Next is the culture differences. Even if a company translates and subs a game to release over here, there's one problem: most if not almost all Americans do not understand how Japanese culture is. Most of their humor would go right over our heads (especially puns since they rely on kanji, Chinese characters used for Japanese reading). Plus compared to us prudes here in America, what they may find acceptable in a game in Japan would never make it past the ESRB over here. How society works in general in Japan is so different from over here that publishers are not willing to risk wasting money to sell a game that they know most westerners would not even understand. Yes there is a small market for them, but most companies want new customers so they can make more money so they can bring over more games. However, when the only ones that buy your games are the same gamers who buy the company's games because they already understand Japan and it's culture, that's not really helpful. The one goal for any business is to make a profit and expand its reach to new customers so it can make an even larger profit. That can't happen with most Japanese games due to this wall between our vastly different cultures.
Until more and more Americans have a better understanding and acceptance of Japanese culture and society, you will not see many Japanese games actually translated and released here. You might as well learn Japanese yourself and then import region free games for your PS3 if you want the stuff that Japan has. Or just move there. That's a life long dream for me is to actually go to Japan one day. ^_^
Xelloss
Member
Yeah, I understand that most Japanese are not fluent english speakers.
My point was more making some menus and stats slightly more navigable, and just contracting out a translation for the script. Farm it out to USA based translator and editor. Or someone native-fluent.
Which is why I pointed out the expense/sales ratio. Now granted, I do not know how much it costs to have a script translated. And it will obviously vary by project, with most shooters and fighters being tiny, and some VNs being huge.
But anyhow, I will take an extreme example and use Type-Moon new PC game coming out. Goto Amazon.co.jp and you see it is listed there for just under 7000yen, which is a tad over 80$. So, if Type-Moon offered the game as a direct sale via digital DL for $80... and sold 1000 copies outside Japan... thats 80k. (well, there will be overhead and/or fees to a hosted service or online shop but this is just an example so lets keep it simple)
Would a new T-M game sell more than 1000 copies to western english speaking folks if it was in english? I would certainly think so, though I have no idea how many would be sold total. But I think 1000 is a very safe low ball number in this case. So, could a decent translation be had for under 80k? Under 50k? I would think so.
In the age of the internet, its not terribly difficult to expand your potential market , with a minimum of overhead.
Magna_Mixalis
JERK-sama
While all of the arguments/suggestions regarding the smaller J-publishers making their games more foreigner-friendly are reasonable for the most part, all of you are forgetting one very important part of the equation: programming.
Contrary to popular belief, swapping text is probably the hardest and most problematic part of the localization process. Depending on how the game's code is organized, the seemingly simple process of swaping text could (and sometimes does) require major re-programming. There have been a number of games I have worked on where the text had to be MANUALLY copied and pasted into the game as the original Japanese text was hard programmed into the game code. Many of the smaller developers simply do not have the time/manpower required to insert/debug/check multiple languages.
Another thing to keep in mind is how Japanese text is encoded versus English. Japanese fonts are 2 bit as opposed to English, which is NORMALLY 1 bit. Some games have dynamic text windows which are sized depending the amount of text used, with a maximum limit based on the number of points/bits that the window can reasonably display. If a game is only a single language, this really isn't an issue (unless you have 1.5 bit issue, which just wreaks havoc...) but if you have dual language, even on a limited scale, there has to be two different blocks of code to handle the different font types. Not only is that extra coding that needs to be done, but since these two pieces of code are essentially doing the same thing, extra debugging will have to be done to ensure that they are't stepping on each other, which can (and with certain games like <poodles with mowaks!> WILL) crash/freeze the game.
There's more to it, but unfortunately, I have a deadline that must be met so I have to stop here. Maybe if I feel motivated enough (and get some free time) I'll post up a series of articles going into the more dry and technical aspects of what we do.
Xelloss
Member
Thats a very good point Magna. Certainly, planning for multi-lingual from the get-go would be ideal. With proper planning/engine/middleware , the technical barriers can be dramatically reduced.
I definitely get your point, I guess my surprise is that to the best of my knowledge - noone has even tried it, ever, not for any game type of any genre. It also sounds like many devs do not even seriously factor in future localization during initial development.
If you ever get time and motivation to do that write-up, that would be very cool =)
Also, it has to do with publishers only getting games they know will make them money. You can get fired over a failure of a new ip, but you won't if you pick a game that just happened to hit or miss and is a franchise that is long running. Here I've always felt it's about the money and not the creativity, but there is always the indie route.
Magna_Mixalis said:
While all of the arguments/suggestions regarding the smaller J-publishers making their games more foreigner-friendly are reasonable for the most part, all of you are forgetting one very important part of the equation: programming.Contrary to popular belief, swapping text is probably the hardest and most problematic part of the localization process. Depending on how the game's code is organized, the seemingly simple process of swaping text could (and sometimes does) require major re-programming. There have been a number of games I have worked on where the text had to be MANUALLY copied and pasted into the game as the original Japanese text was hard programmed into the game code. Many of the smaller developers simply do not have the time/manpower required to insert/debug/check multiple languages.
Another thing to keep in mind is how Japanese text is encoded versus English. Japanese fonts are 2 bit as opposed to English, which is NORMALLY 1 bit. Some games have dynamic text windows which are sized depending the amount of text used, with a maximum limit based on the number of points/bits that the window can reasonably display. If a game is only a single language, this really isn't an issue (unless you have 1.5 bit issue, which just wreaks havoc...) but if you have dual language, even on a limited scale, there has to be two different blocks of code to handle the different font types. Not only is that extra coding that needs to be done, but since these two pieces of code are essentially doing the same thing, extra debugging will have to be done to ensure that they are't stepping on each other, which can (and with certain games like <poodles with mowaks!> WILL) crash/freeze the game.
There's more to it, but unfortunately, I have a deadline that must be met so I have to stop here. Maybe if I feel motivated enough (and get some free time) I'll post up a series of articles going into the more dry and technical aspects of what we do.
On this I agree. You may notice this in the Arcade version of CS. Sometimes the text isn't in the text box and it runs over or under the borders of the window.
Hollow_Ninja
Member
Belisarius said:
Falcom developed and published the game in Japan. XSEED published it in the US. Falcom only "brought the game to the US" in the sense that they sold the US publishing rights to XSEED.
Actually, according to the Xseed rep I talked to, Falcom did the coding too. I might be mistaken though, and you're still right.
Anyways, to answer TC's question, it's simply because most Japanese companies don't have a US publishing arm. They either have to convince a localization company to publish it, or wait for a localization company to come to them willing to publish it. Atlus, NIS, Square Enix, Namco Bandai, Konami, etc. have their own US branches, but the rest really don't have the ability to release their games here.
With digital distribution, the barrier is starting to come down, but there's still the fact that it's really hard for a Japanese company to release a game in English. There is a lack of English speakers to do the translation work in Japan, so Japanese companies that don't have translation staff still can't release a game in English. Games that only require minimal reading, such as Cave's games, are therefore able to be released, but the rest really have no way of crossing the ocean. I'm sure if given the choice, most Japanese developers would jump at the opportunity to have their game released to English speakers at the first chance.
The exception to this is the Tales series. Those games don't come over here because Namco Bandai hates us. As an interesting side note, one common theme across most of the Tales games is that racism is wrong... Though, it's probably the US branch that is deciding not to localize, not NBGI.
Snow
Member
Hollow_Ninja said:
The exception to this is the Tales series. Those games don't come over here because Namco Bandai hates us. As an interesting side note, one common theme across most of the Tales games is that racism is wrong... Though, it's probably the US branch that is deciding not to localize, not NBGI.
Nah I think it's all of Namdai that doesn't want to localize it for us. It's already been stated in an interview of a representative that they may be an overseas branch of the company, but they are still one company altogether. But I agree with you that they hate us. They say Tales isn't doing good enough for them here and yet it sells over 100k and they say DBZ and Naruto games are their really successful ones and that we can expect more from them eternally and yet even though they sell well, they still sell under 100k...
Quillbell
Member
So the only reason for not localizing Tales games is that Bamco hates us? Wow... that doesn't seem like a good business strategy. I always figured that it was just that they were too cautious, so they localized stuff with a broader market appeal (the Naruto and DBZ games).
Shadowfang12
Member
Quillbell said:
So the only reason for not localizing Tales games is that Bamco hates us? Wow... that doesn't seem like a good business strategy. I always figured that it was just that they were too cautious, so they localized stuff with a broader market appeal (the Naruto and DBZ games).
No...it's a perfect strategy. If you hate someone...you want them to suffer. Them not bringing all of the tales game to us is a fate worse then death.
Hollow_Ninja said:
Actually, according to the Xseed rep I talked to, Falcom did the coding too. I might be mistaken though, and you're still right.
No, the XSEED rep was probably right. I don't know exactly how things work over at that den of sin, but they're probably a lot like us: We're just text people, not a programmer in the bunch. We localize the text, and any programming (i.e., re-inserting the text, fixing new bugs, etc) is done by the company we're licensing the game from. I guess the only reason I kind of jumped on the wording there is because a lot of people doesn't really seem to understand what a publisher/localizer does vs. what the developer does. Frequently we're assumed to be a part of Arc, and things we do are attributed to them, or things they do are attributed to us. It's a sword that cuts both ways. I just get a little testy about that distinction because it often ends with people getting mad at us for things that we have no control over. I still stand behind all our products, of course, and to a very real extent we are responsible, as the publisher, for any problems with them, but it bothers me when someone doesn't understand the difference between the publisher and the developer.
Anyway, rant over. Not directed at you, or anything, just letting off a little steam, I suppose.
Shadowfang12
Member
Belisarius said:
No, the XSEED rep was probably right. I don't know exactly how things work over at that den of sin, but they're probably a lot like us: We're just text people, not a programmer in the bunch. We localize the text, and any programming (i.e., re-inserting the text, fixing new bugs, etc) is done by the company we're licensing the game from. I guess the only reason I kind of jumped on the wording there is because a lot of people doesn't really seem to understand what a publisher/localizer does vs. what the developer does. Frequently we're assumed to be a part of Arc, and things we do are attributed to them, or things they do are attributed to us. It's a sword that cuts both ways. I just get a little testy about that distinction because it often ends with people getting mad at us for things that we have no control over. I still stand behind all our products, of course, and to a very real extent we are responsible, as the publisher, for any problems with them, but it bothers me when someone doesn't understand the difference between the publisher and the developer.Anyway, rant over. Not directed at you, or anything, just letting off a little steam, I suppose.
It's ok. You can let off all the steam you want. Hey if it helps you can call me names. It always helps my friends to calm down. Go on try it. You know you want to.
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