3. Localize More Games
The biggest hurdle for Japanese games to overcome has always been the language barrier. While figuring out the controls of a game can be pretty simple, any menus that don't come with explanatory graphics are indecipherable, objectives are unknowable unless someone posts a guide on GameFAQs, and forget about comprehending the story. Why? Besides major cultural factors I'll get into later, the biggest problem with localizing Japanese games is the fact that most games get localized after development, with the insistence on full localization (voices and text) coming in at a close second. As Kotaku recently showed, localizing Japanese text after a game is finished is a grueling task, requiring working with huge spreadsheets and going through multiple builds of the game to catch translation errors. Even worse, because this is usually done long after the game is done and the entire development crew has moved on, there is no way for the people localizing the game to simply ask the writers and developers for context. Why do all this work after the game is done, you ask? Some of it is due to the Japanese publishers not knowing what games might sell in America, but a lot of it is due to the publishers simply not giving a damn about the international market except for a handful of games. Besides the whole "anime games are toxic" mentality of US retailers, the other excuse for Japanese publishers to stay out of the western market is the cost of full localization. In the past, any game that didn't have an English voice track (at minimum) was considered unsellable. But nowadays, most of the people who want Japanese media are at least comfortable enough with subtitle only releases that Namco Bandai felt it could release Project X Zone internationally without an English voice track. With a sizable English speaking expatriate community already living in Japan, the next big step for Japanese games is to make text only localizations a bare minimum requirement for new releases.