Hello. Will there ever be a Japanese server or translation for WoW? It seems weird to exclude a growing market by not providing the means for that market to utilize the game. Most Japanese players are bad at English, so they need a Japanese translation to understand. Recently, interest in foreign games such as LoL and Valorant has skyrocketed in Japan. Those games have Japanese translations and servers. So, the potential for growth is there. Wouldn’t Blizzard be interested in tapping into this market?
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The question you should ask is there a substantial market for non-FF14 MMOs in japan. WoW has thousands of pages of text that would need translated. Not only that they would also have to set up customer support and various other functions for it. Not to mention the data centre would be Japan only due to it’s location.
It’s not that easy.
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sadly i think it’s already too late. Japan just never formed a community of players that is worth from money standpoint to invest into localization, and right now there are too much text and voice to translate.
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Source?
AFAIK western games are relatively unpopular in Japan; they love Sony and Nintendo, but PC and Xbox are kinda dead.
And isn’t Japans population shrinking / getting older?
I was under the impression that Japan by and large has zero interest in WoW? If Blizzard thought there was a market, they would do whatever it takes to cater to it.
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trends{dot}google{dot}com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=JP&q=%2Fm%2F021dvx,%2Fm%2F02ywx&hl=en-GB
This is google trend comparison of FF14 and WoW in japan for the last 5 years.
Yes, it’s not an exact metric, but as you can see, FF14 is 20x more searched than wow, and wow searches have been flat.
If there is a growing market for japanese WoW players, the trends don’t show that.
And japanese players could play on asian servers and create a japanese community there. There are many english EU servers where non-english communities congregate, So that shouldn’t be a block, and once there’s actually a big community, specific servers could be discussed.
But unless you have data to prove otherwise, the interest for wow just isn’t there in japan
Considering that WoW doesn’t exist in japan that’s not too bad really.
What do you mean it doesn’t exist?
Also, the 20x may be a low estimate, WoW is flat 1, which is the lowest non-0 trends can show, so the real number is likely way higher
Does not operate, would the be better.
This is a bug bear of mine where people use a search engine to go to a website they regularly go to rather than a bookmark or enter the web address.
The bulk of the 20x is likely due to that but since WoW isn’t officially a thing there then that’s people actually interested in WoW rather than their daily log ritual.
Again, what do you mean by “does not operate”?
There are a lot of countries where Blizzard doesn’t have offices, there are a lot of countries that do not have specific own-language clients. Japanese people can buy wow and play on any servers, a friend of mine played in a japanese guild on Proudmore-US I believe, might’ve been a different server, but US nonetheless.
As to your point about search engine use, I have no clue why you mention it or what you want with it, you just threw it in there, but 2 things:
1: if you want to measure actual engagement, it’s a bad metric, but if you want to compare similar products, it’s completely fine.
2: google trends doesn’t just show the search term itself, but it gathers everything related into the topic, so “dragonflight” and “shadowlands” and such are all included, so if you google “dragonflight guide” or “dragonflight raids” or whatever, that’s all included in those trend numbers, same for FF14 terms, expansions, bosses, raids, etc.
Has been that way for years. The Japanese have a… condescending… opinion shall we say, of Western games.
When the Japanese game magazine Famitsu which was (still is as far as I know) the benchmark for Japanese game opinion gave Elder Scrolls V Skyrim a perfect score the reaction was… special. Shall we say.
As far I know, you do not have to be perfect transalator, if some body get your message but gives you the complaint, they are a person that you don’t care to be talking to any way. The Google has a transalator this is excellence, I recommend the Google transalator for Japanese and every language in the world, so anybody can play World Of WarCraft in their best language.
How could we argue with that…
IF you have said that a few years ago i would agree, but i can not now because AI synthesized things are a thing.
Indeed, what could possibly go wrong?
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A lot of Japanese people don’t have enough English knowledge to play the game on an English client. This is largely because they have a large domestic entertainment market, including films, tv, and games, it’s no like they’re starved for entertainment even if they don’t speak English.
Japan was also historically behind in PC games popularity due to their large console market. PC games barely existed there in the 90s and 00s. And a big market share of the PC gaming that barely existed was domestic or Korean MMOs. WoW, which isn’t a new game, would have a hard time getting a playerbase there.
I dont know much of the gaming industry…
But what I do know is that games, and specifically MMOs, made in Asia in general are WAY different than the western ones.
They look different. Operate different. And have a different financial structure…
So im not surprised that WoW simply is not popular in Asia. And IMO, if I had to guess why china is the exception… well because the sheer amount of people. Even if the % of wow players is small compared to other games, its still a massive number.
Since we are talking about text and audio translations, the worst possible outcome would be a few funny miss-translations.
AI outputs still needs a review
Oh, of course, bit still less work and less money than hiring several dozens of voice actors and linguists.