Spot On: Selling shooters in Japan

TOKYO--Cyberfront Corporation knows about selling Western PC games in Japan. Founded as a spin-off from Sega in 1998, the company was profitable in its first year, and has achieved consistent annual growth in each subsequent year, selling Japanese versions of games like the Civilization series, Half-Life, Jedi Knight: Outcast, No One Lives Forever, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, and SWAT III.

The company attributes its success to software localization, a knowledge of Japanese market preferences, and paying particular attention to the needs of beginners. Recently, Cyberfront Managing Director Seiji Murai (pictured above, left), President Shinji Fujiwara (center), and Producer Takayuki Kiyomichi (right) met with GameSpot to tell us more. In our interview, they talked about everything from the fact that, contrary to popular belief, FPS games are popular in Japan, to the reasons why Japan's PC game market is so much smaller than its console market.

Murai began by explaining how Cyberfront was born. Before the 1998 spinoff, Cyberfront was Sega's PC game division. One of the company's most profitable units, it boasted a 25 percent profit margin on revenues of 4 billion yen ($36 million), but Sega's focus, and much of its resources, turned towards the Dreamcast as the company bet heavily on its then-flagship product. Seven of the division's employees had misgivings about the Dreamcast's future and decided to leave Sega.

Those individuals founded Cyberfront, capitalizing the firm with personal funds and money from an outside minority investor. The company's primary focus is bringing Western games to Japanese PC gamers, but it also does PC ports of Japanese arcade games, and is branching out now into developing its own games.

Cyberfront's two top sellers to date have been Sid Meier's Civilization III and SWAT III. Murai identified a number of factors accounting for these games' success. He explained that in addition to developing a Japanese interface and manual, the localization process for Civilization III also included producing a strategy guide. "This makes the game accessible to beginners too," he said. "We think that including these guides is one of the most important things for our customers."

Murai also pointed out that as the latest installment in a series that has done well in Japan, Civilization III had good name recognition. Moreover, "the simulation genre is popular in Japan."

On the other hand, he attributed the strong sales of SWAT III to a small group of hard-core fans that he describes as "gun otaku." Apparently the tactical shooter struck a chord among this particular group: Japan's model firearm subculture.

When asked about the common U.S. perception that FPS games aren't popular in Japan, Murai and Kiyomichi pointed out that this is a misunderstanding. "Medal of Honor for PS2 sold 200,000 copies." The problem, they explained, is that the PC gamer population in Japan is much smaller than the console gamer population.

"There are plenty of PCs in Japan now. Except for grandparents, you can find a PC in almost every home. But PCs are in the study, and Japanese gamers are used to playing games in their living rooms--it's more of a family activity. Of course, the fact that Sony, Nintendo and Sega are based here and have been selling console games for so long has also shaped the market."

Murai added "Also, PC gamers in Japan have a kind of 'otaku' image." Installing and configuring PC games requires more knowledge on the part of the user than playing console games, so PC games are less approachable to gamers who grew up playing consoles.

There's also a chicken-and-egg problem here. There are no killer apps because the PC game market is acknowledged to be small: a title that sells 10,000 copies in Japan is considered a hit. But without "must-play" games, there's not much to entice gamers to use their PCs as game machines. In Murai's words, "If a game like Dragon Quest VIII came out on PC, they could easily sell 4 or 5 million copies, but there's just no incentive for Square Enix to move away from consoles."

Asked about their plans for the future, they responded that for the next six months or so, they don't see any PC titles that they think will do well in the Japanese market. As a result, Cyberfront is putting more energy into developing original games and exploring overseas expansion.

Murai said that the company would like to expand to Korea, then China, Europe and finally the U.S., explaining that the consignment purchasing system used by retailers in Europe and the U.S. makes it more challenging to enter those markets. With the recent opening of a Korean subsidiary, and the successful acquisition of worldwide rights to PC versions of Puzzle Bobble and other games, Cyberfront is off to a good start.