http://kotaku.com/sonys-giant-list-of-video-games-1463345943
It's a long interview but totally worth reading. Mentions of localizing Yakuza, Shenmue, FF Type-0 etc.
Here's a snippet
It's a long interview but totally worth reading. Mentions of localizing Yakuza, Shenmue, FF Type-0 etc.
Jason Schreier said:Imagine, if you will, a giant list. Maybe it's an Excel file. Or on a whiteboard somewhere in Sony's offices. Maybe it's written on index cards.
On that list is a ton of names that Sony has been compiling based on fan tweets and requests for three months now.Final Fantasy Type-0 is on there. So is Yakuza. And Shenmue. And many, many others, compiled when Sony's Giovanni Corsi started asking fans to submit requests.
Sony's goal: to bring as many of those games as possible to PlayStation platforms and, if they were never released outside of Japan, to bring those games West.
This afternoon at the big PS4 event in Manhattan, I chatted with Sony's Adam Boyes about what the folks behind PlayStation have planned for the future.
Here's a snippet
Schreier: So if I'm Joe Kotaku Reader, and I've been following this for a little while now, I see you guys promising lots of stuff to come, I see Gio's tweets back in August, and I say—what does that mean for me? When am I gonna start seeing results of this stuff? You said you have announcements to make in a few months, and I don't want to take the steam away from those announcements, but is there anything you can say to those
Boyes: It's tough because we're doing a lot of different things that are gonna make pockets of people happy. There's not like one thing that's gonna make everyone's mind explode. The key is to bring people that are fans of certain content great stuff. So if people are fans of Japanese content, you can imagine that's a place we're putting a lot of effort into. People who are fans of the Vita, you can imagine we're putting lots of effort into that. Even with PS4, right, people who weren't necessarily planning on content, or whether there's a PC game we think should come over. There's a lot of things that are happening in that space..
I would say in the next year's time, if you're a fan of Japanese games, if you're a fan of Vita, then hopefully we'll have a little treat for you.
...
Schreier: With the caveat that this is all up in the air, this is all in negotiations, are there any that you guys have in mind that you would really like to bring over here?
Boyes: I think a lot—we get a ton of requests for Yakuza, a ton of requests for Shenmue. We see the lists. Like everything that people have tweeted Gio, literally we have a person that compiles those lists and prioritizes based on how many requests we've gotten. And I think to date there's well over 10,000 mentions across like forum threads and stuff like that. So those are the ones we're focused on.
But I think the challenge is always that there's so many different intricacies, going into is the creator there, what's the current status, does the publisher have other things going, so it's not as easy as like, 'Why are you taking so long?' There's a lot of things you have to do. And because it is a new thing that we're doing, it's also difficult to sit down with a partner saying, 'Hey, we're gonna do this, it'll be fine.' You can't imagine that the Gearbox team and Randy Pitchford would be like, 'Oh yeah yeah yeah take our baby and just whatever.'
They want to be really involved and they want to be sure we build trust. So I think what you'll see is the first couple will take longer, and then once we get a couple of those games, especially ones localized from Japan over here, then I think you'll see the cadence increase.