Hi – let me chime in on this. I’m Harry and I run Marvelous Europe, so I’m best placed to explain why Shinovi Versus is digital only here, and to be the target of any aggravation that that might cause.
We would love to be bringing the game physically to Europe. We know that physical editions, and special editions, are very important to people, and it is a major part of our strategy in the future to support them. Europe has been overlooked for a long time, by many Japanese publishers, and we will be trying very hard to rectify this.
However, there are a number of reasons why it’s more practical for this to be done in the US than Europe right now.
1. We have never released a PSVita game before. The PSVita market is different from the 3DS one. Us manufacturing a load of PS Vita games which then don’t sell would be a pretty bad start, and scupper all our ambitions to bring a whole load of other games to Europe. We need to do this one step at a time.
2. We are a very small team – in Japan, Marvelous is hundreds of people. Marvelous USA/XSEED is much smaller, but still 15 or so people (who work incredibly hard for their fans and do a great job). In Europe, there are four of us. That’s four people launching mobile, console and PC games. This will expand steadily if we are successful, but we just don’t have the capacity to do a physical release right now. Doing that involves salespeople, distribution, merchandising and a whole bunch of other stuff that we just cannot handle right now. Four people is not many – but it’s four more than there used to be, before we opened our office, so it’s a step in the right direction. So ‘they should hire more staff’ sounds kind of obvious, but there’s a chicken/egg thing there that we need to be able to pay them before we do, which means taking things one step at a time.
3. At the moment, Japanese games tend to sell a lot less in Europe than in USA. One reason for this is likely to be that some players are put off by a lot of games being English only. We’d love to rectify that in the future, with more languages, but, again, that’s a long term thing for us.
4. Physical releases, however desirable, do come with a good deal of baggage for a publisher – for example, a lot of retailers don’t like to stock niche games like ours. They take a big margin (much bigger in the UK than in the USA by the way), which makes it more expensive for customers and they also won’t let a publisher release a digital game for less than they sell the physical one for. If the game doesn’t sell out immediately, some retailers will reduce the price – but then will go back to the publisher and ask for an equivalent discount. This, plus the high cost of goods for the game (ie what the publisher pays for the cartridge, box etc), can result in a situation where publishers end up making a loss even on a game which sells OK.
So, all those four reasons lead to the situation that, while I’m pretty confident Shinovi Versus will be popular in Europe, I’m not so confident that I want to put people’s jobs on the line if it turns out I was wrong.
What I’d love to do is find out more about exactly what people do want in future – and also, over time, to understand exactly how many people there are out there who will buy our games, if we can give them to you in the ways you want them. One thing we want to do for next year is introduce our own store, so we can sell limited editions, maybe some packaged versions etc directly, without all the difficulties of trying to sell everything through retail.
At the end of the day, we’re a business, and we need to make money in order to pay everyone. For everything we want to do to improve the business in Europe, we have to make a financial justification to our parent company as to why that’s a good idea, and worth the investment. So, for example, we’d love to have more languages supported in our games, but the upfront cost is huge – Harvest Moon, which came out last year, had over a million words. Slowly, I want us to establish business cases for all the things we want to do – whether it’s a French translation or a physical limited edition.
We’ve talked a lot internally about how best we can give our players what they want. One idea we’ve been considering is whether some kind of pre-order/pre-pay or even Kickstarter-type approach might allow us to fund bringing physical copies, limited editions or even translations to market. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. I don’t think we’ll be able to do it this year, but it would be amazing if we could start doing things like that next year.
So, on the basis that, no matter how much we all want it, we just cannot deliver a physical version of Shinovi Versus to Europe, we’re keen to see what, if anything, we can do to soften the blow. For example – one possibility is that we sell a ‘limited edition’ pack which includes all the materials people would get from the US release, but not the game itself. Obviously, we’d need to price everything so that people aren’t getting ripped off, and we’d sell it directly so we can keep prices where we want them to be. I know it’s not the same as the full special edition but it might be that some people would want that, although others might prefer to import the US version. Unlike Burst, at least the fans who really want the physical game can get it from XSEED/Marvelous USA.
Thanks all for the feedback. One thing, though – I want to keep this forum a nice place to discuss gaming. While I appreciate that some users may be frustrated that they’ll have to import if they want a physical game, I don’t appreciate seeing abusive comments towards my staff, other companies, or indeed other forum users. Other parts of the internet are pretty tarnished with that kind of thing, and I won’t tolerate it here.
Please remember, we’re four people in a room in Kent, trying very hard to make this work. We appreciate your support.
Thanks Harry