bout a month and a half ago I did something that I'd never done before. I imported a game; specifically, I imported a copy of Demon's Souls from Hong Kong. At the time I imported the game a publisher had yet to pick this one up for a North American release, which was odd given that all the voice work was done in English and the Hong Kong version included English menus.
In the past week Atlus has announced that they will be picking up the game for a release in North America this fall. Even though I already have a copy of this game I'm still pretty excited about this news — Demon's Souls has some very interesting gameplay aspects going for it, even if it is frustratingly difficult. I bring all this up because the whole situation has left me curious as to just how it is that developers decide on which games get localized for different markets.
There are several ways in which cultural differences manifest themselves.To try to answer this question my first move was to try and contact several developers directly and see what this criteria was for them. I didn't get a lot of the information I was looking for, but I can make some inferences based off of the research that I've done into this matter. What I've found is that the main reason for why some games make the jump overseas while some don't is due to cultural differences. There are actually several ways in which these cultural differences manifest themselves.
The first is through differences in cultural interest. There are games out there that will only find a lot of appeal in certain regions. For example, there are quite a few equestrian and horse racing games that have been release in Japan that wouldn't be able to find much of an audience in North America. The same can also be said for other places in the world. A strategy game in Germany — the name of the game escapes me at the moment — is quite popular there but hasn't quite made the jump to other areas, unfortunately.
A big cultural difference that restricts what games end up making the jump overseas is in the differences between ideologies and common knowledge. There are many games out there that reference cues from popular culture or a particular culture's history that would be hard to understand for someone else who has no experience within that culture. This is where people have made the comment that such and such a game is too Japanese for American audiences and vice versa.
Look closely at the differences between the original script and the translation.This is actually a legitimate claim; in a recent interview on IGN, one of the developers for The Legendary Starfy mentioned that culture is the exact reason that Nintendo gave for not bringing the previous games in the series overseas. It also explains why first-person shooters don't fare very well in Asian markets. Those games succeed because the cultural touchstones that Western audiences understand when they play those kind of games don't exist for Eastern audiences. If there's still any doubt about this, just look at the differences in translations between games that already have made it overseas, particularly those that have had a remake. There is a clear and marked difference between early scripts that tried for a very literal translation and the more current ones that went for getting the main point across.
Do keep in mind that this is purely speculative; without direct confirmation from developers I can only guess, but it doesn't make the points that I've made here any less relevant. These are quite legitimate reasons for why gamers won't see certain titles on the shelves. Despite all this, there is some hope for people looking to see a wide variety of titles from all corners of the globe. There are some publishers out there like Ubisoft and EA who've developed a policy of putting out all of their games everywhere. Sure, they may not sell particularly well in a given area, but at least gamers there will have the option of being able to obtain something they may enjoy playing.
