The past is the future. The future, the past.
7 Apr 05

I put some screenshots from the recently announced Seven Kingdoms: Conquests in the Image Gallery. Interesting art style there.

Gamasutra has the story that based on projections the European installed base for the PS2 will exceed the US installed base sometime later this year. While there's no word on how much of that is due to the Winning Eleven series, it does raise some interesting questions. Why does Nintendo still treat PAL territories so poorly? Some have argued if Nintendo fought harder for Europe instead of fighting the Xbox on its home turf, they wouldn't be in third place right now. It appears there might be some credibility to that.

Analysts have long blamed weaker European sales on localization problems. Publishers have used the same excuse to ignore large parts of Europe. It seems to me that that story proves there's some big money to be made for someone starting up a contract localization firm. You'd need some talented multilingual voice actors and translators, but on the whole, I'm sure a dedicated firm could do a faster and better job customizing localization for the major markets of Europe. Once they got established, I'm sure American and Japanese branches could be opened and the free flow of games could begin. A guy's got to dream.

Jason