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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Yet, Japan had no issue building a wide range of popular console video games but had far less success in PC games. Language seems like a better explanation as US and Japan had quite different UI constraints in their native language.

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Japanese game devs didn't put nearly as much effort into PC games as they did into console games, outside of some early exceptions like the MSX and the Sharp X68000. The main issue was that there really wasn't a domestic market for PC games in Japan, and Japanese game devs focused on serving the domestic market first. So you had half-assed efforts like a single outsourced developer "porting" Mega Man 1 and 3 to DOS (they weren't anything like the real MM 1 and 3). PC ports of most popular console games weren't common until the Xbox 360/PS3 era.

I mean, official PC ports weren't common, but clone games on PC were extremely common. I can't tell you how many PC games* I played as a kid that amounted to "a re-skin of Super Mario Bros" or "basically Donkey Kong", etc etc

*(often free or packed into "1001 games for free with this magazine" disks)

“I’m getting it for the kids” doesn’t work for a $2,000+ PC that can play the latest games, and that has always kept PC gaming niche in Japan.

There are often other reasons. For example, in Korea console gaming isn't or wasn't a thing. It's PC gaming. Why? Because to Koreans in the 80s and 90s, playing something made by Japanese, their former occupiers, was unacceptable. Because of that they played games on PCs until that became standard for Korean gaming.

Other reasons PC gaming might not be a thing in Japan. It takes a lot less room for a console (especially NES/SNES/Gamecube) than it does for a PC. You plug the console into your exiting TV. A PC needs it's own space with it's own monitor and desk. Japanese houses and especially apartments are small.

I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons than just that a PC costs more.

Language (i.e. character sets) is not a good explanation for differences in software outcomes. It is possible write Japanese entirely in Hiragana charset (~50 chars) which can be represented in 8-bit alongside ASCII chars, which is how early Japanese computers like the PC-8001 worked. The JIS standard for double-byte representation of kanji also characters was also made in the 1970s. So that doesn't explain why Japan fell way behind in software the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

Language is more than charger sets. Japanese is often read in vertical columns, then right to left. The space of UI’s that feel natural in both languages are just different.

Not true. Nearly all text in Japanese print media, ads, brochures, websites, video games, etc. is left-to-right horizontal. Only books and some magazines are written in vertical columns. Anyway, this again is not an insurmountable technical hurdle that held back Japan's otherwise burgeoning software industry.

Well, yes, to some degree this does affect localization in the US for software that was originally built in Japan. However, given that the Japanese character sets are more demanding than US character sets, it would usually mean that software made in JP is easier to port to US, and not the other way around. Emoji for example came from Japanese mobile phones ("e" pronounced "ay" means picture, and "moji" means letter)

You misunderstood, the fact that the language does both means the design space is different. Stuff that would seem natural in Japanese would seem very odd in English.

Similarly there are far more people fluent in English so small dev teams can reach a much larger audience without considering translation issues.

My impression is that the technical mess from Unicode(Han unification, nonlinear byte count <-> letter count relationship) and difference in types of words used("parts of speech", whether a noun or verb or a short sentence is used in labels) are larger problem than character sets and reading directions for Japanese translations.

I'd argue that Microsoft still takes the lead in software compared to Sony and Nintendo

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