Japanese Survey Shows Tricky Market For Western Games

Posted by simoniker on Friday November 21, 2003 @02:12PM from the rising-sun-falling-hopes dept.

Thanks to GameSpot for their article discussing the results of a survey of over 1,000 Japanese gamers, conducted at this year's Tokyo Game Show. Among the more telling trends was a definite lack of interest in Western-developed games: "The percentage of respondents currently own non-Japanese software? Just over 1 percent. And only 4 percent expressed interest in buying such software in the future." The survey also revealed the true dominance of the RPG in Japan, as "...39 percent of respondents identified it as their favorite genre. This is far ahead of every other genre: strategy gaming, the second most popular choice, tallied only 7 percent of the votes." Finally, although it may be that Tokyo Game Show attendees "tend to be hardcore gamers", thus skewing the results, "ownership of [Xbox] ranked lower than five consoles that aren't even in production", including the Dreamcast and Saturn.

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Re:Which games converted to japanese? by TwistedGreen · 2003-11-21 16:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

Just what the hell are you trying to say? You make no sense.

"IMHO the Japanese are really a big bunch of different people from much of the world culturally."

Your wording here is atrocious. I think you're trying to say that Japan is different from the rest of the world, but what exactly do you mean by the "rest of the world"? Try to realize that America is not "the rest of the world." Do you think that most Americans understand more than a few words of any language other than English?

This article isn't about translating games into Japanese. It's about how Western-style games are NOT INTERESTING to the Japanese culture. Or is that what you're trying to say?