Analysing the Japanese games market
summary
Company publishes Western indie premium games into Japan and finds console releases on Switch and consoles deliver higher ROI than mobile, so resources pivot to Nintendo Switch. Market is dominated by large F2P titles, but top charts are country‑specific; Japan is not interchangeable with China or Korea. Common failures: bad localization (one game mistranslates “dwarf” as kobito), slow paper NDAs and stamps, and ignoring onboarding and UI. Multi‑platform ports cost ~5% extra but can add 50% revenue.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:47Japanese mobile market
- 3:39Similar to China and Korea
- 4:49Asia
- 7:33Developers into Japan
- 10:05Why Western developers want to come to Japan
- 10:55The Japanese way of negotiating deals
- 12:30Biggest mistakes Western developers make
- 14:36User experience
- 15:55Multiplatform games
- 18:02Localisation
- 19:36Outro
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