Japanese Survey Shows Tricky Market For Western Games

Thanks to GameSpot for their article discussing the results of a survey of over 1,000 Japanese gamers, conducted at this year's Tokyo Game Show. Among the more telling trends was a definite lack of interest in Western-developed games: "The percentage of respondents currently own non-Japanese software? Just over 1 percent. And only 4 percent expressed interest in buying such software in the future." The survey also revealed the true dominance of the RPG in Japan, as "...39 percent of respondents identified it as their favorite genre. This is far ahead of every other genre: strategy gaming, the second most popular choice, tallied only 7 percent of the votes." Finally, although it may be that Tokyo Game Show attendees "tend to be hardcore gamers", thus skewing the results, "ownership of [Xbox] ranked lower than five consoles that aren't even in production", including the Dreamcast and Saturn.

Re:Which games converted to japanese?

[dajak]

You asked: If Japanese don't buy American games because of the cultural differences, why do Americans buy so many Japanese games?

I think because the Japanese write certain games with the American and European market in mind, and the Americans don't write games with the Japanese market in mind. In other words, the Japanese are currently just better at crossing cultural borders.

Just because US companies are hugely successful in selling games, movies, music, etc. in many other cultures doesn't mean they are specifically designing products for other cultures. The US just has a huge internal market, huge budgets, and therefore good entertainment products. It also happens to have strong historical and cultural links with many other wealthy cultures. Japan has a sizable internal market, which translates to competitive budgets, and is therefore hard to be successful in. India and China will also get harder as they get wealthier. Many other cultures don't have that internal market and just adapt to a dominant culture.

(One of the reasons I like some low-budget European RTS games is that it gives me the opportunity to play the Dutch on a European map. Some US games go as far as making the Netherlands part of France on maps, for instance, and that is definitely a sales mistake in this particular market. US game makers make these Europe-centred games for the US market. Strong sales in Europe or former colonies of European countries are little more than a side effect.)

The relevant factors for success for entertainment products in foreign markets is 1) relative size of home market to foreign market (no control and anti-symmetric), 2) cultural affinity with foreign market (no control and symmetric), 3) effort in adapting to foreign market (under control). From the US point of view factor 1 is dominant in the case of Japan.

An example is movies: Dutch productions are some 10 times more profitable relative to budget than American productions inside the Netherlands. Still only 3 Dutch movies make the top 10 for the year on average, and producing a Dutch movie with a budget of a few millions is a highly risky exercise because you absolutely must reach a sizable proportion of the population to survive as a producer.

The most profitable movies made here are weird movies like Antonia that do pretty badly here, get an Oscar for best foreign movie, and lure a few million Americans and Europeans to the cinema to watch an 'art' movie.

Japan can be a very good market for westerners: The two biggest attraction parks in Japan are Disneyland Tokyo and Netherlands-history-themed park Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, after all. From the Netherlands point of view (again relative to home market size) Japan is a very important foreign market and no more difficult to access than the US or even France for entertainment products like music.

It is unfortunate that the Japanese are sometimes portrayed as 'xenophobic' just because they are capable of producing a lot what they like for themselves. In the Netherlands people would moan the loss of Dutch culture if an American attraction park even dared to compete successfully with the venerable Efteling. The Japanese are in fact remarkably open to exploring exotic Western culture if presented the right way. But you would probably agree to that.