The PAL sales of the Operation Rainfall games will influence localization decisions.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/27401
Nintendo of America is closely watching the sales of three highly-requested RPG games in Europe, to gauge their potential for North American localization.
The games in question, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, have been the cause for much petitioning against Nintendo of America due to the fact that all three are slated for an English release in PAL territories, yet there are "no plans" to release the games in North America. A fan-based community of protesters rallied together under the name Operation Rainfall in a campaign to convince Nintendo of America to change its mind about the releases. Little has been said by Nintendo in response to such requests.
In an interview with IGN, Reggie Fils-Aime was questioned about the status of the games in America. "We will be watching very closely what happens in Europe," he said. "Certainly if there are business opportunities and positive consumer uptake from some of those titles, that will be great data for us to consider as we look at what to do with these titles."
From this, we can at least glean the fact that Nintendo America has no intention of simply ignoring these games. It is now up to the PAL public to show that they truly intend to buy these games as promised, proving the US localization a worthy cause.
Wouldn't the game have to be localized to English in order to be available to the UK market? So the work to localize it to North America is already done, because America and Canada speak English. So what's the big deal? The games are complete and the localization is complete so bring it over already!
Wouldn't the game have to be localized to English in order to be available to the UK market? So the work to localize it to North America is already done, because America and Canada speak English. So what's the big deal? The games are complete and the localization is complete so bring it over already!
I'm probably being cynical but I'm almost reading this as "we're just waiting until these games bomb in Europe so we can justify our decision."
The part of all this that has upset everyone is that THIS is the time to release these games. They're leaving the Wii userbase with literally NOTHING until Zelda or Kirby comes out. Meanwhile they have these games right fucking here and could fill this gap up. They could easily have had a semi-regular release schedule for the Wii this year if they positioned these games strategically. Instead the Wii, the supposed market leader, is a barren wasteland in 2011. It's not so much that we don't get these games but that we get nothing at all. It seems like giving the finger to their fans. "Hey thanks for your loyality despite shitty third party support, paying full price for a refurbished Gamecube, dealing with broken gimmick controls and dumbed down games targetted at casuals! Here's an expensive paperweight!"
Nintendo wants to win back core gamers with the Wii U. Core gamers expect healthy release schedules. They expect variety and that means they expect some niche genres to be represented. Do you think for a second the Playstation or Xbox brands would have the core gamer credibility they have if every shmup or RPG or other niche genre got blocked from localization because it wasn't a guaranteed mainstream hit? Being the "hits only" company is really not much different than being the casual company. They won't win anyone back with that attitude. It doesn't matter if these games ever get localized, the damage is done. If Nintendo was "hip" to the needs of core gamers, this would never have happened. They've poisoned the Wii U before it even had a release date. It's all uphill from here.
They're just sitting and waiting on Europe's sales numbers.
Well, there still would be some work because the current English version would be in PAL format (which isn't used in NA). They'd still have to transfer the English script back into the original Japanese's NTSC format, then clean up any bugs that would result from the transfer.It doesn't really work like that any more. There's just a simple setting they'd have to flip.
The PAL sales of the Operation Rainfall games will heavily influence localization decisions.
