https://store.steampowered.com/app/686720/
Many people believed that there would be no way Square Enix would announce and release a game on Steam for Japanese audiences only and that a Steam release strongly indicated a simultaneous English release. Now the game has been listed on Steam with the release date confirmed. The entire listing, including the title of the game, is entirely in Japanese. There was a big warning telling people the game does not support English, much like several Koei Tecmo releases have done previously. So now there are two major Japanese publishers putting games on Steam entirely for the Japanese audience. Thoughts?
P.S. This game is very very good.
I thought that SE had done this before with that one Arthur VR game, well to be fair they did region lock that one so if you were in the US you could not even access the Steam page for the game,this seems different. So from my understanding one of the issue sometimes with Japanese games on Steam is that native Japanese speakers are not able to find a game since most titles are either in English or go by their non Japanese title.
The reason that I mention that is because I think (but I'm not 100% sure) is that some devs said you can't change the name of a game or it's Steam ID (or something like that) which is why you see more and more Japanese games that have the Japanese name of the game in order to make it easier to find, stuff like Mega man is different in Japan and the west. I'm curious if they can change the name and if that would change stuff and if it does than why don't other devs change the game of their other games like say SEGA with their titles, as of now it looks like it's mainly only Capcom and KT that do duals titles (IFFY also does it with some games).
What I'm really curious about is how is handling the Steam page, I mean is SE Japan making sure that the game will get updated and what not or are they all just leaving it up to the western branch of SE, with the western SE branch relaying messages to SE Japan about bugs that people report and other things.
If it does turn out that this is in fact a SE Japan thing and that they want to test out some things by release on Steam at the same time that they release in Japan and seeing how well it does that way as opposed to waiting till they release in the west. Possibly to see how much of an audience there is in Japan and to see how much of an audience there is abroad that are able to understand Japanese games without the need of an English patch.
I wonder what we will see out of these, one possible negative thing is how some people may end up buying the game and only later realizing that it's not in English and leave a negative review just because of that, which will give the game a bad look with it having possiblity mixed reviews before it gets an English patch months later.
I'm going to be keeping a close eye on this and see how people react to it in it's launch week.
