Nintendo has promised to support more Japanese games abroad in Europe and North America, Daemon Hatfield says in a video post for IGN on Jan. 31.
“In a presentation for its third quarter financial results,” Hatfield says, “Nintendo promised to support games made by Japanese developers more strongly in the West.”
It has been a growing fad among Western developers, who have been focusing on what Nintendo calls “mega-hit titles for home consoles, and having fewer of their development studios producing software for handheld devices like the 3DS and Vita.” That is not to say that developers are ignoring the 3DS entirely—there are still games made ideally for them, but they are not as frequent or make quite as big an impact as back in the DS’s heyday.
The opposite is true in Japan. That is where “handheld devices are how people play most of their games,” Hatfield states. And again, unlike the West, many developers sign on their best teams to work on handheld games and software.
Nintendo CEO, Satoru Iwata, had this to say during the conference: “We therefore plan to more actively support the Japanese software developers in distributing their titles overseas this year. Among those third-party titles both developed and published in Japan, there have been some games which Nintendo has published in Europe, including the ‘Professor Layton’ series. We will increase the number of such games for the U.S. market as well as in Europe. We are also willing to flexibly assist third-party developers in distributing their valuable games overseas.”
Thus, excitement should be high, because now there will be no more searching high and low of fan-translated copies of games, both legal and illegal, as well as foreign copies of games that cannot be understood because of a language barrier. Now, famous titles from one country can be enjoyed in another.
For more information, check out Daemon Hatfield’s video (also embedded in this article) or you can read Daniel Krupa’s article for IGN.
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