Okamiden Development Team Struggled With Marketing Difficulties
by Nicholas Taylor, posted on 28 March 2011 / 384 Views
Speaking with Gamasutra regarding the launch of Okamiden, the game's producer Motohide Eshiro and the game's director Kuniomi Matsushita have given some details regarding the marketing issues they were faced with.
“With the release timing of Okamiden in Japan and the pan-Western territories some six to eight months apart, the challenge of marketing a game twice becomes an issue,” they explained. “Since internal development time and resources contribute to the marketing in both markets, the campaign needs careful planning.”
Capcom tried to avoid budget issues by going to the fans of the original game, and also trying to spread the word on Facebook.
“Facebook provided, and continues to provide, a platform to make people aware, get people talking and driving praise for the high quality creative assets produced using valuable R&D resources. By utilizing Facebook in this way, the Okami brand now has a global hub for any future titles in the series.”
They also explained that the game's staggered international release was cause for concern. “In the time between the releases of the Japanese version and the pan-Western SKUs, information about the game was posted to the internet. We understood that fact and therefore did not place many restrictions on the information or assets used for overseas PR promotions.”
To avoid showing fans the same things they'd already seen from the japanese promotional materials, they had to make completely new videos for the game's second release.
“This is obviously a strain on development resources and something we are more acutely aware of now. … Using development resources to create these assets can tax the development schedule and team resources. We all worked very hard to make sure the best possible assets were created for each specific market. We will work to improve on this in the future.”
Okamiden was released on September 30th last year in Japan, and just recently on March 15th in America and March 18th in Europe for the Nintendo DS. It's a sequel to the highly acclaimed PS2 title released in 2006, and later ported to the Wii, Okami.
