Rainbow_Dashtruction said:
cursedseishi said:
Rainbow_Dashtruction said:
Wasn't the four previous Yakuza games extremely unprofitable in the west? If they don't make the money back from localization, its surprising they kept localizing the series.
They don't spend a whole lot on localization though, at most its simply just adjusting the text to fit the size constraints of the boxes it goes into after it's translated. Voice Acting tends to be the big cost item when doing these things, which Sega hasn't been doing since Yakuza 1 (or 2, if I'm wrong about 1 being the only game with English voices).
It sells well enough though, specially if you're claiming all 4 sold badly, to warrant releases up to Yakuza 4 and the Dead Souls spinoff. It just sounds like the devs (or Sega), doesn't feel like bringing in any additional developers to handle translating and localizing the game. And in that case, they should just hand it over to Atlus to handle that. I mean hell, it's not like they have to pay them more now to do so or anything.
Well the poor sales in the west IS the reason SEGA doesn't do it. All four of the games had consistently awful sales. Yes they might make a small profit from translating it, but companies generally look the way of "If we can use those same resources to make more money elsewhere, it's not worth it".
Even then, how expensive is it to translate an entire game? I figure it probably isn't piss cheap if so many companies refuse. It's not like your just doing a direct translation to English then re-sizing text.
See, yes, the games sold poorly.
But they probably sold poorly because SEGA did a terrible job of bringing them.
I played the first and became a fan of the series. The first sold badly, but it probably could have recouped the money spent if its localization hadn?t been so expensive due to using english voice actors.
So they learnt their lesson and only put subtitles on Yakuza 2. Good move. Except for the fact that SEGA took ages (2 years!!) to bring the game to the west. When it finally came, people weren?t playing PS2 anymore.
Then they didn?t bring Kenzan, pissing off fans. Then they bring Yakuza 3 terribly LATE. It was an early PS3 title, brought at full price, more than one year after the Japanese launch, when the system had greatly advanced. So it got reviews saying that it looked dated. And it were incredibly dated compared to Red Dead Redemption, that launched the same year (2010).
To this date I haven?t played Yakuza 3 (even though I own a copy), because SEGA WON?T LET ME PLAY YAKUZA 2 ON PS3, and I am not going to dust my PS2 just so I can follow the series.
Then, only after they announced Yakuza 5, they released 4 on the west. Again, a lot of time after the japanese release.
And they released 2 spin-offs on the PSP that they didn?t bring to the west.
I really enjoy the series, I want to play the games and follow the franchise. But SEGA just makes it too troublesome for me.
They only bring the games they feel like bringing, usually more than one year after they were relevant.
In the rest of the world, Yakuza can?t sell the amount of games that they do in Japan, unfortunately. But it surely could have gathered a cult following and some avid fans outside of Japan, if SEGA didn?t went great lengths to aggravate its fans. There is profit to be made, if they weren?t so blatantly incompetent.
I would gladly import Yakuza 1 & 2 HD if they came with english subtitles. See, THESE GAMES WERE RELEASED IN ENGLISH, GODDAMIT! Why couldn?t they have put english as an optional language? Where is the cost? A group of interns could have localized it based on the originals.
A lot of games nowadays come with several languages (Uncharted, Tomb Raider, GTA V, God Of War, Halo, etc). Even though this are top tier franchises, the thing is that games are being released simultaneously worldwide, and the industry is moving away from the old "release first, then, eventually, localize" model.
SEGA could have released the games with budget price, put them exclusively on PSN. Take less profit now and build the franchise for the future.
Deadly Premonition (old game, cult game) was released on the PSN. And it is an isolated game. Yakuza had the potential to become a cult series, with games still being developed.
So, in this particular case, I don?t think one could just blame the consumer for the poor sales. The sales were meager because SEGA did a terrible job since the series inception, and even I, as a fan, have no interest in investing in a series without knowing if the games are gonna be released at all.
