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Originally Posted by lockedowne
Anyone know if theres a possibility of a North American release of the game down the line?
The first episode was cool, can't wait for more. Eruruu's tail thing was way cute, lol.
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Keep praying to your Leaf gods... (or at least help out the industry by buying localized games.) Hirameki, when asked about the possibility of licensing AIR, responded that the game license is simply just too much money at this point. I would wager that Utawarerumono has a similarly high (but maybe not as high) licensing cost. There is a PS2 version slated for June, so maybe that might change things, but currently, there just isn't enough market incentive to license such a game. If people can demonstrate that they are actually willing to buy these games (and I don't mean just some random smidgeon of people from various forums, I mean a good chunk of people, like at least a few thousand or so), then perhaps these companies will think differently.
Currently, it seems that most of the people interested in these games are online, and there is a LOT of people who simply just download the games without paying for them. The classic example is planetarian, localized by insani. insani put up well written instructions on how to purchase the original version (for roughly 10 USD) upon which you can apply their translation patch. Of course, a few hours after their release, planetarian made its way onto torrent sites and accrued a large number of downloads. I seriously doubt most of the people who downloaded it off a torrent site actually bothered to purchase the actual game. _This_ is what commercial localization teams are worried about, and why you see things like Virtual Mate, etc. popping up. Sure, the clamour for English versions of these games are really high, or at least very vocal, but there simply isn't enough people right now IMO who are actually willing to pay for a professional, high quality translation.