Bandai Namco has announced they will be halting all their overseas development efforts because they failed completely.
Bandai Namco’s CEO states that their use of overseas developers was supposed to “appeal to Americans” but that “in the end it was all no good.”
The strategy they say they adopted was to have their Japanese head office analyse suggestions from their foreign developers, and then have the foreigners “do only the titles which should work [for Americans].”
Unfortunately, this only resulted in a variety of titles which crudely aped the most successful western blockbusters without any real success.
Namco seems finally to have realised this was a flawed strategy: “For a game to really sell, whether in Japan, America, or Europe, if the head office doesn’t think it’s fun it’s impossible.”
The astonishing revelation that games have to be fun to sell well has lead them to change strategy – “We’ll be stopping all overseas development. It’s mostly stopped already.”
Square Enix also reported similar failures – in their case the solution appears to have just been to buy a successful foreign studio outright.
The move of course should have no bearing on their decision (or more likely, non-decision) to localise certain titles developed in Japan for overseas markets.
Bandai Namco has announced a long term goal of having 50% of their sales in overseas markets, up from 23% at present; unfortunately, at present it seems Japanese and western gamers have very different tastes and can only be persuaded to buy the same games in a limited number of genres.
As Japanese developers have not generally been very successful at producing games solely for western audiences, Namco’s decision to focus solely on using domestic developers may prove rather problematic in light of this goal.
You don’t need to appeal to the western audience with western ideals. As long as it’s intersting and fun people will play it. They aren’t giving themselves a chance. I would play tales of grace, xilla and whatever else if it was translated. Not with english voices. But just so i can understand it. I don’t want a muscle head main character, i want someone different, i see the same stuff already in our own games.
Sidenote: dead or alive is a good example. The characters spoke japanese i didn’t have any less fun playing it even though i didn’t understand what they were saying.
Cyberconnect2 does a good job at listening to their fans. They recently opened up a english portion on their facebook page. They listen and they respond.
Unlike Capcom!! But i won’t get started with them…
I guess i trying to say take a chance jp gaming companies, you have more support than you think!!
And ironically this art is done by Todd Mcfarlane
hey well gee, i wonder why their games dont sell in the west. PERHAPS YOU SHOULD FUCKING RELEASE THEM IN A NON-BETA STATE!
I think that’s a smart idea… I really don’t think there is a market for Japanese games other than a chosen few. Seriously, if people wanted to play japanese games, you would learn the language and then play it.
it’s not like a great number of japanese games are even brought over to the states anyway.
When it comes to Japanese games, nothing beats one that has men with vaginas.
so are you proclaiming that all Japanese male protagonist do not have balls? Seriously, have you played enough games to even make that comment? What is wrong with non-eccentric NORMAL characters who just don’t want to be part of the strife?