It might seem odd that I’m posting Nintendo related news here, but Nintendo’s Reggie made an interesting comment in a recent interview with Siliconera that may be worth mentioning here.
Going off of that, how much do what fans want or say influence your decisions? [Operation Moonfall and Operation Rainfall are cited as examples here.]
I have to tell you—it doesn’t affect what we do. We certainly look at it, and we’re certainly aware of it, but it doesn’t necessarily affect what we do. I’ll give you an example. I mentioned earlier that our head of product development had a bet on X versus Y—we also had a bet around localizing Xenoblade.
I wanted to bring Xenoblade here. The deal was, how much of a localization effort is it? How many units are we going to sell, are we going to make money? We were literally having this debate while Operation Rainfall was happening, and we were aware that there was interest for the game, but we had to make sure that it was a strong financial proposition.
I’m paid to make sure that we’re driving the business forward—so we’re aware of what’s happening, but in the end we’ve got to do what’s best for the company. The thing we know [about petitions] is that 100,000 signatures doesn’t mean 100,000 sales.
I find this interesting because Operation Rainfall was ultimately a success and Nintendo was criticized for not localizing the games in the first place. Yes, there’s obviously a financial side to localizing these games and Nintendo needs to make a profit, but when you have Gamestop managing to sell copies of Xenoblade for $90, then one has to question Nintendo’s decision making here. Nintendo, obviously being very successful with the Wii at the time, didn’t see the merit in localizing JRPG’s. Yet it’s games like that which their core fanbase wanted. Now, without the help from the casual gamers who moved on to mobile and tablet games, Nintendo is struggling to sell their new console and more than ever needs the help from its core fans which they neglected to support with the previous Wii. I’m not saying that things would have turned out all that differently had they localized more games and focused less on shovelware for the Wii, but Operation Rainfall clearly highlighted a problem with Nintendo at the time and it seems they’re only slowly learning their lessons from that.
The reason I mention the above is because it shows what may seem like good decisions in the short term could turn out to be bad decisions in the long run. The way Sega is now limiting their games output in the West to “proven” franchises feels like it might turn out to be a bad decision as well. While Sony seems eager to expand their library of games and genres in all their markets, Sega is doing the exact opposite. And while Reggie might say fan campaigns don’t affect them, there are plenty of examples where such campaigns did have an impact and where other companies did listen. Let’s try to make a difference as well.