Original Article Link:

http://jtmgames.com/2012/03/09/operation-rainfall-succeeds-bravo-nintendo-for-taking-the-jrpg-risk/

Operation Rainfall was the code name given to the operation in an attempt to get someone to localize Xenoblade in the US. It got very good reviews so far. Ironically, the US was for once, the last to receive the localization of a game. The EU and even Australia got the game localized before the US did.

JRPGs are not really a risk. As long as you try your best to make a decent game, you will usually hit close to the 50,000 units sold mark in Japan. The bigger games sell 100,000 and the big name titles sell a million. The risk is trying to sell them in another country like the US. Unlike other countries, JRPGs are not as appealing to most western audiences. They also avoid spending too much money on advertising in the US so some people might not even know about the game that is being released. The reason for this is that advertising can be much more expensive in the US so it might not be worth it for them to spend so much on advertisements. Their budgets are low compared to most western games, but they make the most of what they have.

Most Japanese games take around 6 months to be localized in the US and a little longer (usually another 2 to 3 months) to be localized in the EU. Sometimes, they take even longer. It is very rare, but sometimes it can take longer. One of the problems is that there is huge criticism of JRPGs by the western community and that hurts their sales a bit. The negative attitude towards JRPGs is one reason why more people are going to be reluctant to publish JRPGs in the west. They do not expect good sales so why bother?

One of the major factors that seem to affect the success of JRPGs is the appearance of characters. In most JRPGs, the characters look more Japanese than they do American or European. People seem to complain a lot about this. This perpetuates a stereotype that all these characters look stupid with their skinny arms and spiky hair. If they want to see more JRPGs localized, this attitude needs to change. Japan has plenty of games and they can sell their games to their consumer base quite successfully. While they can make a little bit more from other regions of the world, most of their consumer base is in Japan so they focus on games for them. This results in some rather obscure games that you would not see elsewhere like the dating sim RPGs known as Persona 3 and 4.

The western developers do not try as hard to make games for their consumer base. They have a huge consumer base in the US and EU, but tend to fail elsewhere compared to other game developers. Their model is based more on a "you want this" and rarely try to refine their games. Their excuse as to why their games fail to sell in Japan is a simple "Japan is behind" rather than "we need to do some market research". Japan has been making video games for 30 years now and while they have come up with some newer and more creative games, they have managed to find a market for some of these. If anything, Japan is much further ahead and the US has a dying market for video games with games having to be tailored to a more narrow audience rather than making a game that can appeal to more people.