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Lost Odyssey And Japan's Western Gaming Success

Posted by Zonk on from the honesty-is-always-the-entertaining-policy dept.

Gamasutra has on offer today an extremely honest interview with Feelplus president Ray Nakazato, a veteran of Capcom and Microsoft and an expert on the Japanese gaming market. Nakazato discusses a variety of topics with obvious candor, including struggle that western game companies have in Japan, the state of various in-development game titles (such as Lost Odyssey), and the history of the Japanese game market. "In the early days of the games market, Japanese games were pretty interesting back then, while many games from overseas were seen as being bad. Now, you'll find a lot of interesting and fun games coming from North America and Europe, but because of that experience that we have from the early 1990s, people tend to stay away from Western games.""

2 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe True by SethraLavode · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Metroid isn't a very popular series in Japan. It's very much a franchise that Nintendo has kept around for its North American fans and tailored it with a Western audience in mind.

  2. Re:Different culture likes different things by Frumply · · Score: 2, Interesting

    WoW is not talked about in Japan because there is no official service for WoW in Japan. I believe the reason was that it wasn't a worthwhile venture to enter Japan, where everything would have to be retranslated, and having to compete in a market where MMOs with cutesy characters (Ragnarok Online, FF11) are extremely popular and styles similar to WoW not entirely appreciated.

    Also, I'm not sure about your impression of the 'dating sim' genre, but that is just another very small piece of game sales in Japan. I mean, within the genre sales of 10,000 copies is consider a hit, and 100,000 is astronomical. Social prejudice against fans of comics/animation/games is still very strong (they would probably let it slide if you were a gaijin), and like the way you have politicians blaming GTA for school shootings you have news crews blaming those dating sims for child kidnappings. There are insane amounts of third-party figurines, comics, etc produced within this genre for sure, but it is still confined to a very niche market.