NotMSRP said:
What's the real reason for the Euro shafting in this industry? Is it because of the complex nature of dealing with a continent instead of one country? If so, what is exactly complex in dealing with Europe? Or is it something else?
"Multiple languages" is one of the biggest issues. Usually games are localised in 5 languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian), but more and more of them are being localised in even more (Dutch, Portuguese are becoming more popular now). This normally causes the European release of games to be held up, as most of the time games aren't localised as the game is developed (you might not think it, but more often than not, most development teams don't finalise the text in their games until *a few weeks* before their game is mastered and submitted to Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft).
More and more companies are doing simultaneous localisation (Sega for one, Microsoft is another), but most (if not ALL) of the major Japanese ones get the NTSC versions out of the way first as the Japanese and US markets combined are bigger and easier than Europe to deal with, as you're only dealing with 2 stand-alone language versions and 1 TV format.
European localisation is often an after-thought to most Japanese (and even American) developers as it can cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to do (you're effectively making multiple versions of the same game that need to be fully tested from start to finish). Sometimes it's just not cost-effective to do it if your game is enormous in terms of text content and niche (RPGs for example). Some games companies will often not do a PAL version because it won't make a profit in Europe. Very few are into "doing the right thing" and releasing something "to please the fans" as that doesn't pay the bills (and most of the time the "fans" will have imported the game anyway, meaning that no-one will buy it: that's a particularly vicious circle that a lot of niche developers have to deal with).
Also distribution is different from country to country in Europe, so you've theoretically got to deal with a large number of different distributors if you want your product released across the PAL territory.
