"Life of a European Gamer"

By now I’m sure many of you are aware that Europe does get the hard shoulder when it comes to games releases, especially if they’re set for Nintendo consoles. As a European myself I’ve decided to show you in this Investigation what being a gamer in Europe is really like, of course I’ll be asking the usual questions such as “Why does it take so long?” and “Will this situation ever change?”

Now some of you may be thinking that this is yet another moan from those Europeans, some of you may sympathise, but when you have to wait for a console to appear on shelves seven whole months after the US received it, you’d understand why we’re not very happy. This blatant ignorance from Nintendo has taken its toll on many gamers here and the market for the GameCube is slowing down due to bad marketing strategies, no major games being released (or at least being released at the same time as the rest of the world) and in some cases we don’t even get the games. It’s turn into a pathetic mess, leaving Sony and Microsoft to jump in and claim a whole market, fine I’m not a believer in “console wars,” but surely Nintendo must be losing money from this or at least can’t be gaining much.

I’ll show you a major example of Nintendo’s lack of caring for a European market. In 2001 a certain console was released in the US, it was called the GameCube. Everyone was happy playing away on Star Wars and Super Monkey Ball, but us little European folk stood there scratching our heads, believing it wouldn’t be long until the GameCube is released in our home towns. Christmas passed, a few months later the Xbox was released, some fed up Nintendo fans gave up a bought the Xbox or the PS2 instead (never to look back either), the rest of us sat waiting for the day. Then two months later (on May 3rd to be exact) the purple wonder box hit the shelves of European stores. Of course we were happy, but when we went on the internet to talk to our US buddies about the cool games, they just shrugged and said there were better games out (of course these games weren’t around in Europe), so we couldn’t really talk about the Cube.

Now this wouldn’t have been the case if Nintendo had decided to get themselves off their overly lazy asses and converted the technology to be PAL compatible and manufacture enough consoles. This shouldn’t have taken more than two months.

Of course I’m slightly over reacting to the situation as we’re not always forgotten about (but most of the time we are), Mario Kart Double Dash!! was released before the US, which you could say was something except for the small fact that we had it only days before the US (Europe received the game the Friday before US release), now what kind of show is that? Were Nintendo trying to impress us that they haven’t forgotten about us? Of course they were but they over looked the fact that it wasn’t a very “exclusive in Europe for a few months” package. Fine it was kind of them to do it, but a simultaneous release is not something that can make up for years of neglect and months of waiting for game releases.

Marketing is something Nintendo is lacking all over the world, but in Europe it is atrocious, their recent marketing campaign for Mario Golf is so bad that I don’t know they bother. This next moan is really aimed at Nintendo Europe themselves and I will single one man out, his name is David Gosen. Who? You ask, well he was the man behind Nintendo’s marketing and advertising department at Nintendo of Europe, he’s the man responsible for everything that has gone wrong. Advertising is an important factor in today’s society, fine Nintendo have their base of loyal fans, but there’s now this aspect of the “casual gamer” and they need to appeal to this crowd also (which I’m not too fond of this idea, but they have to, only for the sake of staying around as an active company). However, David Gosen didn’t have a clue about Videogames and so the marketing strategies were just plain wrong and downright stupid. Thankfully though he has recently left Nintendo (I’m speculating that he was actually fired) and now we in Europe may see some quality Nintendo adverts than the ones you see in a children’s comic book (The Beano and The Dandy)…Yet again not helping with Nintendo’s so-called “Kiddy image”.

I am however, pleased to see that the situation with the Game Boy franchise is somewhat much better. The SP was released around the world at about the same time (give or take a few weeks apart) and has sold extremely well. We do actually get games within weeks of the US receiving them. So why isn’t this the case with the consoles? Well Nintendo’s excuse is that it takes time to localise the games and convert to PAL. Yes that’s an acceptable excuse, but translating a game shouldn’t take more than a month? Nor should the PAL conversion.

Though Nintendo are at the moment claiming the European situation is changing and we’ll be receiving the games much faster than before, this is due to converting and translating the Japanese version of the games instead of the US version. Of course I’m highly sceptical and doubt there’ll be any change, but we shall have to wait and see.

But in the mean time, when will we be receiving Tales of Symphonia or Four Swords Adventures? There’s been no release date for either. And believe it or not, Nintendo are releasing Animal Crossing over here in Europe this September! Talk about being late! With this kind of bad release scheduling I’ve resorted to importing games from the US, last year I imported Animal Crossing and The Wind Waker and this year I got so impatient that I imported the Japanese version of Four Swords Adventures. Is this bad for Nintendo? Well they don’t like people importing games, but I have no other choice but wait months and months if I don’t import. So Nintendo, I’m sorry to say this but you’re shooting yourself in the foot and if it carries on Importing will become so popular that you won’t be able to control it. So get yourselves sorted!