As if to partially disprove the point made in my last post, and to show that it is interested in selling core games, Nintendo has decided to partner with Square-Enix for the forthcoming Dragon Quest IX on DS, with Satoru Iwata making it very clear how keen the company is to help promote the game overseas.

In an excellent piece from one of my favourite writers, Chris Kohler on Wired.com’s Game | Life blog, Iwata remarks that “there are two things I’d like to make reality. The first is to build a thriving Japanese game market together with Dragon Quest that rivals the West’s. The second is to form a strong tag team to promote Dragon Quest overseas. At Nintendo, we were able to popularize the Brain Age series overseas, which was said to be unmarketable. I want to increase the number of people worldwide that understand the appeal of Dragon Quest, which represents all Japanese gaming culture…even if that only turns out to be a single person.”

As Kohler says, this is hugely significant for two reasons - one, that Iwata is concerned about the Japanese gaming market, to the degree where he’s hoping one game can spark it back into life after recent lacklustre sales of both core and mainstream titles; and two, that he’s concerned that Japanese games aren’t selling overseas.

If anyone can get this strategy to work, it’s Nintendo - and it’s heartening to see that someone is making an attempt to bridge the gap between Japanese and western gamers. It’s telling that there’s a growing market in Japan for western titles (with a few games - mainly first-person shooters like Resistance 2 and Bioshock - selling to relatively small but not insignificant numbers, particularly in launch week) but that there is little sign of the reverse happening in the west. Let’s hope that Dragon Quest IX can open the eyes of a few people to how the Japanese do things, and that this could spark an increase in more eastern-friendly titles making it big in the west.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 12:58 pm by Chris Schilling
DS, Japan, Problems?, Surprises, marketing.