And that’s of course before getting into their tendency to release late, bad ports at ridiculous prices. This of course includes features such as arbitrary rendering resolution-that is, when they don’t simply port a last-generation console version rather than the most recent one. It’s not that they are bad games, it’s that Koei-Tecmo has not, even after many releases, invested even the modicum of effort required to support the very basics expected of 3D games on PC. And one reason for that should be blindingly obvious. Koei-Tecmo has also ported a lot of games to PC recently, and they increasingly linger in the low 5 digits in terms of owners, according to SteamSpy’s numbers.
Valkyria Chronicles (a strategy RPG from 2008!) has now reached a staggering 600k+ owners.Īll of these are certain to have made back the investment on their quality ports many times over. Dragon’s Dogma was released less than 2 weeks ago, and sold its current 220k without any deep discounts. Hyperdimension Neptunia Re birth 1, a very niche game, is sitting comfortably above 200 000 owners according to SteamSpy. Toukiden Kiwami (source: SteamSpy) Koei-Tecmo, this is why you failīefore talking about Koei-Tecmo I want to make one thing crystal clear about the success stories pointed out in the previous section, and that is that good ports generally succeed on Steam: First, let’s talk about Koei-Tecmo.ĭragon’s Dogma vs. This makes yesterday’s release all the more of a baffling disaster, but more on that later. They are porting more and more of their franchises, and their same-day release of Zestiria was easily the best version of the game, even before modding improved it further. Until just recently, I’d have happily included Bandai-Namco in this list of success stories. NISA’s PC version of Disgaea is happening about 5 years later than it should have, but you can already tell that at least some care and effort is being put into it. Capcom inarguably took far too long to port Dragon’s Dogma, but when they did they delivered an excellent result with great performance, variable framerate and resolution support, extended options, and at a fair price.Įven Square-Enix, after some problematic initial attempts, is making progress, and both FFT-0 and Lightning Returns show some respectable efforts on PC, even though there is still room for improvement. 
Sega’s selection of games to port might not be to everyone’s taste, but all their ports are technically solid, and sometimes they include gems like Valkyria Chronicles. Small companies like Idea Factory International manage to port and support their niche games without issues, and with all the basic amenities expected on the platform. Many of them either started out releasing quality ports, or at least continuously increased both the quality of their ports and their support. It should be clear to even the most reticent doubter at this point that Japanese publishers have started to realize that in most cases, not porting their games to PC is leaving money on the table.
Valkyria Chronicles, a great port of a great game made by 3 people The state of Japanese ports: it’s actually not bad!
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