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Radge
Joined: 14 Dec 2012
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Location: Town of Duwang
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 Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:17 am Post subject: |
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| rothcol_shepard wrote: | | Colour wrote: | | Baba stated in many interviews that he doesn't want to westernize Tales just to cater to western audiences. Namco's main market is Japan. |
Yes, he did say that, which makes me very curious as to how long he will be able to keep that up for. |
My guess is...until the Japanese are tired of Tales.
Which is not anytime soon.
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rothcol_shepard
Joined: 13 Mar 2013
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:19 am Post subject: |
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| Radge wrote: | | rothcol_shepard wrote: | | Colour wrote: | | Baba stated in many interviews that he doesn't want to westernize Tales just to cater to western audiences. Namco's main market is Japan. |
Yes, he did say that, which makes me very curious as to how long he will be able to keep that up for. |
My guess is...until the Japanese are tired of Tales.
Which is not anytime soon. |
What I mean is until the higher-ups tell him otherwise. Baba has as much power as Namco is willing to give him. If they demand a change, not much he can do buy comply. All depends on how long they see this "for japan only" mindset to be profitable. And I think they will change that sooner rather than later.
But we shall see.
Last edited by rothcol_shepard on Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:20 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Ondes-Martenot
Joined: 14 Mar 2013
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:19 am Post subject: |
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| rothcol_shepard wrote: |
sheer incompetence |
You're being to hard on Bamco. My take on Symphonia's success is that is was it was the only RPG for the gamecube at that time so it had Nintendo and their magazine backing it up. If the series had Nintendo's support and zero competition then I would expect the titles to keep selling in the millions. |
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Radge
Joined: 14 Dec 2012
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Location: Town of Duwang
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:22 am Post subject: |
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| rothcol_shepard wrote: | | Radge wrote: | | rothcol_shepard wrote: | | Colour wrote: | | Baba stated in many interviews that he doesn't want to westernize Tales just to cater to western audiences. Namco's main market is Japan. |
Yes, he did say that, which makes me very curious as to how long he will be able to keep that up for. |
My guess is...until the Japanese are tired of Tales.
Which is not anytime soon. |
What I mean is until the higher-ups tell him otherwise. Baba has as much power as Namco is willing to give him. If they demand a change, not much he can do buy comply. All depends on how long they see this "for japan only" mindset to be profitable. And I think they will change that sooner rather than later.
But we shall see. |
And I say that it'll last long until the majority of Tales fans/players/audience live in the land of the rising sun.
And besides, I don't like my Tales westernized. I like western settings for them (Innocence and Xillia 2), but not western type gameplay.
That's like a concoction of the worst kind when handled wrong.
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rothcol_shepard
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:23 am Post subject: |
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| Ondes-Martenot wrote: | | rothcol_shepard wrote: |
sheer incompetence |
You're being to hard on Bamco. My take on Symphonia's success is that is was it was the only RPG for the gamecube at that time so it had Nintendo and their magazine backing it up. If the series had Nintendo's support and zero competition then I would expect the titles to keep selling in the millions. |
But it's success was a HUGE chance to gain mainstream acceptance for the series, even against later competition. Being a well-known IP gives huge selling power. |
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Ondes-Martenot
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:27 am Post subject: |
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| rothcol_shepard wrote: |
But it's success was a HUGE chance to gain mainstream acceptance for the series, even against later competition. Being a well-known IP gives huge selling power. |
True, and I think they capitalized on that as much as they could but future games didn't have all that free advertising and nothing to compete with. The PS2 was certainly not starved for JRPGs and Abyss was not on the cover any magazines I'm aware of. I know Bamco put money into advertising as anyone would have to but their is no way it had the same easy ride as Symphonia. |
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rothcol_shepard
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 12:55 am Post subject: |
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| Ondes-Martenot wrote: | | re games didn't have all that free advertising and nothing to compete with. The PS2 was certainly not starved for JRPGs and Abyss was not on the cover any magazines I'm aware of. |
Which is why they should have ported it to GameCube for international release and stuck with Nintendo. Abyss could have done very well as a GameCube exclusive in NA/EU backed with the same support Nintendo game Symphonia, including being on the cover of Nintendo Power.
I think the platform jump to PS2 was their biggest mistake. Making PS2 versions for Japan would still have been good, but they should have gone GameCube only outside Japan. |
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Ondes-Martenot
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:06 am Post subject: |
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| There is no way Nintendo would have cared if Abyss was on the Gamecube. It would have been mentioned in Power for sure but Nintendo has a lot of IP to talk about so the cover would have been out of the question. A JRPG for the Gamecube was old news when Abyss came out as it already had Symphonia and Baten Kaitos. It could not rely on the same untapped market approach as it had before. The PS2 was the most mainstream concole for JRPGs and the best shot Abyss had. |
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rothcol_shepard
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:09 am Post subject: |
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| Ondes-Martenot wrote: | | There is no way Nintendo would have cared if Abyss was on the Gamecube. It would have been mentioned in Power for sure but Nintendo has a lot of IP to talk about so the cover would have been out of the question. A JRPG for the Gamecube was old news when Abyss came out as it already had Symphonia and Baten Kaitos. It could not rely on the untapped market approach. The PS2 was the most mainstream concole for JRPGs and the best shot Abyss had. |
Then maybe making it multiplatform for PS2 and Gamecube in both territories would have been the best solution.
Ignoring the fact that all the current international fans of Sypmohina were GameCube users is not smart marketing. A multiplatform release would have kept these fans as well as brought more new fans to the series.
I also think Namco is missing a big opportunity by not porting Tales of Xillia to the Xbox 360 for the international market as well. While PS3-only makes sense in Japan, Xbox 360 makes up for around half of the console market outside Japan. Alienating this market is not good, especially when port costs can easily be covered by about 15,000 sales.
I find it hard to imagine that a 360 port of the game wouldn't sell at least 15,000.
Combined with the fact that, again, all the fans that got into the series this gen are 360 owners who played Vesperia.
Going from single platform to multiplatform = Good
Jumping from one platform to the other = BAD
Just to point out, one can play EVERY single Japanese-language mothership home console Tales of game on a single console if they own an early model PS3. Or, 2 consoles, a PS3 and a PS2. That's still pretty good.
To play them in English on the other hand, I need:
- PS2
- PS3
- Xbox 360
- Gamecube
Makes it much harder to follow the series.
Last edited by rothcol_shepard on Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:21 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Ondes-Martenot
Joined: 14 Mar 2013
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:20 am Post subject: |
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Yes in certainly would have but I doubt that was a possiblity. As I said before, this isn't the triple A market. To my knowledge, a publisher for these kinds of games has to pick a concole and stick with it.
I don't blame them for keeping it PS3 only, Vesperia was commercial failure and I don't thing it's as easy as selling only 15,000 units. That just sounds way to simple.
Last edited by Ondes-Martenot on Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:56 am; edited 4 times in total |
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rothcol_shepard
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:22 am Post subject: |
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| Ondes-Martenot wrote: | | Yes in certainly would have but I doubt that was a possiblity. As I said before, this isn't the triple A market. To my knowledge, a publisher for these kinds of games has to pick a concole and stick with it. |
Says who?
Atlus is even more low-profile than Namco and even they have released both Catherine and Persona 4 Arena as multiplatform titles in all regions.
Namco makes the games for PS3 only as they are ONLY looking at the Japanese market and not considering additional options to help international success. They are foolish enough to believe the same marketing technique will work here than work in Japan, when they won't. |
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Arrei
Joined: 23 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:29 am Post subject: |
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I believe putting Abyss on the Cube would have would have still given it a lot of notoriety. It may have been a bit less starved by then, true, but it was still very much hungry for RPG support, and Abyss would have had Symphonia's following to use as a springboard. It wouldn't have needed as much coverage as Symphonia did, because they could have simply featured it with a few ads and a few articles in NP as "the next game made by the guys who made Symphonia". Whereas going to PS2 was essentially starting over from scratch in a market unfamiliar with the series.
We can see this effect with ToS2. Even as a spinoff that saw little advertisement long after its predecessor had come out, it easily outsold Abyss and Legendia just by going off the footprint Symphonia made.
And Vesperia was only a failure in its home market because the 360 is basically a non-entity there. |
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Ondes-Martenot
Joined: 14 Mar 2013
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:55 am Post subject: |
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Persona 4 games are guaranteed successes before they're even developed. They can do stuff like that.
| Arrei wrote: |
We can see this effect with ToS2. Even as a spinoff that saw little advertisement long after its predecessor had come out, it easily outsold Abyss and Legendia just by going off the footprint Symphonia made.
And Vesperia was only a failure in its home market because the 360 is basically a non-entity there. |
That wasn't on the GameCube and Vesperia actually casued a serge of 360 sales in Japan. It was a failure in NA. |
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Arrei
Joined: 23 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 3:22 am Post subject: |
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Where are you getting the idea that Vesperia was a "failure"? It wasn't exactly a hit or anything, but it outsold Abyss and Legendia, according to life-to-date NPD figures.
Gamecube or not isn't the point, either. ToS2 was riding solely on the wave that Symphonia made, and did better because of it. Abyss would have seen much more success had it rode on the same wave, but it didn't, and also didn't advertise anything on a system inundated with RPGs either, and thus... we have the thing above, with Vesperia outselling it. |
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Ondes-Martenot
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| Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2013 4:54 am Post subject: |
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| I meant in NA. I don't know if the figures you got take into account the PS3 re-release. Though..., I may have misspoke. I think I might have been thinking of the "Best game no one played" award in got from VG Chartz. Also who said they didn't advertise Abyss. Still, I don't know what you mean by "wave." Does that meant a sequel to a popular title or the fact that is was on a Nintendo console? So, what should they have done with Abyss? Make it for the Wii and hope Nintendo does all their talking for them? Should ToG and ToX both be WiiU titles? |
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