The-Excel wrote:

Fantastic. Now they have even more reason to cry about getting the shaft in the gaming industry.

Of course we get to cry. We get absolutely fucked over.

First off we get limited releases on nearly everything. The NES pretty much got no promotion over here and loads of games aren't released here at all or have ridiculous schedules were Japan and USA gets a game like March and we don't get it till October or some shit, if at all.

Look at PSN, look at the list on Wikipedia. You get so many games. Europe gets about 1/10 of the games that USA gets.

I think we have a right to be cry about getting fucked over like that.

I would like to play Resident Evil 1 on my PS3... can i do it, no. - well i can but i don't own the game.

Syd Lexia wrote:

A lot of the time, it comes down to money. Games need to be localized for each region. And it might not always be profitable to do so. I remember I had a ROM of some crappy Smurfs SNES game and the first thing I had to do was pick from like 6 languages, because nearly every country in Europe has its own language, because it was cheaper to release one game with several language options than to release separate versions for each country. Do they still do that? Is that even still possible? That's the problem. America has a population of 308,745,538. For a game to considered a huge success, it needs to sell at least 800,000 copies. Japan has a population of 127,360,000. For a game to be considered a huge success, it needs to sell at least 300,00 copies. The UK has a population of 62,041,708. I don't know what it takes for a game to be considered a huge success in that market. I do know that a lot of companies don't handle their own publishing there, because they don't consider the risk to be worth the potential payoff. A lot of smaller companies, like Atlus, simply can't afford to. So you have to rely on publishers like Codemasters and 505 Games to pick up games and publish them. And they can't afford to publish everything, either. What's really funny is that even though you guys miss out on a lot of games, you STILL manage to get stuff that America doesn't. Nintendo gave you guys Another Code: R and at this point, will probably never release it here. I have a solution for the UK: switch to NTSC. If you guys did that, then you could potentially get reclassified as Region 1 and get all the same releases that America gets. Of course, you'd also to have to deal with the fact that the grammar and slang are optimized for the much bigger American market, but that's a small price to pay.

I totally agree with what your saying. Games like Earthbound which have already been mentioned and weren't released here are pretty well known games, however that may be by todays standards and not from back when it was released. I can see publishing being a problem over here but you would think that big titles that are selling well elsewhere in the world would get a similar release date.

Also let's be honest that Nintendo game isn't exactly a big title game that we got here. There's loads of games released by UK developers but to be honest i rarely hear about any of them. Most of the games these days come from the US or from Japan. Rarely do i play games that come from the UK and Germany among others.

Also with the PSN stuff there is no excuse why the games haven't been released here. It's getting distributed online.

Also Europe does contribute to games in other ways though. E.g. Havok is based in my native country and developed the physics engines used in: (off the top of my head) Starcraft II, Half Life 2 and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Like realistically think of how many US developers/publishers you know then think of European ones.

US:
Valve - Half Life, Portal, L4D
Electronic Arts - various sports games
Activision - COD
Blizzard Entertainment - Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Lost Vikings
Vicarious Visions - Crash Bandicoot
Rockstar - Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption
Take-Two - owns Rockstar, 2K games.
Gearbox - Borderlands, Duke Nukem
2K Games - Bioshock, Civ games
ID Software - Doom, Quake
3D realms - Duke Nukem
Naughty Dog - Crash Bandicoot, uncharted
Neversoft - Tony Hawk series
Insomniac games - Ratchet and Clank, Spyro the dragon
Lucasarts - indiana jones, star wars, maniac mansion, day of the tentacle

These are companies some of which are defunct, some which have been merged with other companies or bought. Still these are companies you know that have released lots of well known and highly regarded games. I can barely think of any UK developers. Bullfrog are UK i'm pretty sure. You won't get those games really because the companies are so small.

Though it can get more complicated as i'm sure Activison Blizzard is owned partly by Vivendi who are a french company.