JRPGs to JRPGs. So more like oranges to lemons - they're both citrus. I am well aware that Final Fantasy has ten times the popularity of the Tales series. Again, I posted numbers to that effect. (Although it seems FFXIV has flopped hard, but that's irrelevant.)
My point is, 81% of the sales. You can not seriously believe that the cost of translating the script, hiring English voice actors, and performing the localization is /more/ than 81% of the cost to write the script in the first place, design the characters, compose the music, hire Japanese voice actors, code the game engine, build the world, and everything else that goes into making the game in the first place.
Incidentally, that's just the Symphonia 2 example. Tales of Vesperia for the XBox 360 sold better in NA than it did in Japan. Again, for the lesser cost of localization versus creating the game from scratch.
I'm not trying to say localization is free. It's not. But it's still a bargain at those sales prices - and that's with Namco-Bandai barely advertising.
As an aside, you could play more of the Tales games if you tried out a console not made by Nintendo. Is it hard to rent/borrow a PS2?
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-01-26 03:29 am (UTC)My point is, 81% of the sales. You can not seriously believe that the cost of translating the script, hiring English voice actors, and performing the localization is /more/ than 81% of the cost to write the script in the first place, design the characters, compose the music, hire Japanese voice actors, code the game engine, build the world, and everything else that goes into making the game in the first place.
Incidentally, that's just the Symphonia 2 example. Tales of Vesperia for the XBox 360 sold better in NA than it did in Japan. Again, for the lesser cost of localization versus creating the game from scratch.
I'm not trying to say localization is free. It's not. But it's still a bargain at those sales prices - and that's with Namco-Bandai barely advertising.
As an aside, you could play more of the Tales games if you tried out a console not made by Nintendo. Is it hard to rent/borrow a PS2?