Ask John: Why Aren’t There Many Anime PC Games in America?

Question:
Why aren’t there many anime related PC games? There are a bunch of great anime based games like .Hack and Dragonball Z: Budokai, but the problem is that my parents won’t let me get a PS2 of GC. Is there any specific reason?

Answer:
Generally there aren’t any anime themed computer games available in America because there aren’t any available in Japan that are suitable for American localization. Unlike North America, which is heavily dominated by Microsoft format PCs, Japan has a much higher percentage of Macintosh computers that generally aren’t designed for computer gaming. Furthermore, the vast majority of anime style computer games that are available in Japan are pornographic hentai games. Quite a few of these “bishoujo” games have been localized for the American market, but their nature makes them niche market products not suitable for mainstream American release.

Typically the major mainstream anime PC games that are released in Japan just aren’t particularly marketable in America because they don’t suit typical American tastes. Gainax, for example, has produced several PC games including Evangelion adventure games, Evangelion typing tutoring games, and the famous Princess Maker series of “life simulation” games. But life-sim and Japanese text based adventure games simply aren’t popular in America. Broccoli has produced PC games for Galaxy Angel, but the combination of dating sim style text based adventure with text intensive strategy and space simulation isn’t the sort of action oriented computer gaming that’s most popular in America.

There are exceptional, easily accessible anime based PC fighting games including Glove On Fight, Eternal Fighter Zero and Melty Blood, but these games are all unlicensed amateur productions using characters from famous copyrighted anime franchises including Kanon, Di-Gi-Charat, Gunparade March, and Air. While these games are sold in Japanese stores, the fact that they are unlicensed software using copyrighted characters renders them impossible to officially release in America.

Japan simply doesn’t produce a significant number of anime based PC games in the genres and formats that most mainstream English speaking PC gamers would pay to own and play. And since a video game has to sell far more copies than a manga graphic novel or DVD does to be considered successful, there’s simply not a big enough market for Japanese PC games in America to encourage studios to create original anime games or import existing Japanese games.

TOKYOPOP is sponsoring the creation of an American Initial D PC racing game. And there is a Yu-Gi-Oh computer game due out soon in America, but beyond these two offerings, the future of anime based PC games in America doesn’t really look very bright.