So I have heard good things about Nobunaga's Ambition 12, and it's made by KOEI so this isn't exactly a game made by some indie developer from their garage. There's even a Chinese version even though I can probably play the Japanese version. This game is about 2 years old (for the Chinese version) but it looks like a lot of people still play it, so shouldn't be too hard to buy one, right?
So first I went to KOEI Taiwan's website. I noted that the screenshots are in Japanese, even though the game is actually in Chinese (for the right version anyway). KOEI Taiwan doesn't sell the game directly but it sells through some company that sounds like it could be some illegitmate operation, but what the heck, it's the official one. I went to the site, and it appears the game is sold out, but there isn't really any indicator anywhere. I can't add it to my shopping cart but then I can't add anything on it anyway. In fact when I click on the shopping cart page it took me to a blank page. So that's no good.
Next I went to the local Chinese bookstore. They used to carry these games but I didn't find any. I thought about asking the guy but I figure since I was responsible for the 3 out of the 10 total sales they ever had in the last 10 years they probably just stopped carrying this stuff. I don't blame them for stop carrying these games.
So then I tried Amazon and found they don't sell them. I tried Play-Asia.com, which was advertising from the MagicBox, and it's out of stock. At this point, my only recourse was piracy unless I was going to call up a relative in Taiwan and have them look for the game, so piracy it is. Of course piracy involves navigating through a mess of shady sites and downloading from other shady sites. Thankfully when a game was pirated by thousand of guys they're usually pretty good at spotting anything like Trojans and stuff, so I think I'm okay here.
The PC industry for Asia (well, I don't know about Korea) seems to be total disarray. When you've an infrastructure that cannot sell you a 2 year old game that appears to be one of the most popular PC games in the area (Asia just don't get many PC games) there's a problem. Why doesn't something like Steam exist? I'd think you'd be able to make a bit more money if you have a halfway decent system, and even if not it's not going to get worse than selling 3 copies of the game in a month. People who are willing to pay also would have a piece of mind knowing they wouldn't have to get the game from a site that is marked as 'DANGEROUS' by any anti-virus scanner. I realize Steam is annoying if you ever forget your password, and it's sometimes easier to just pirate another copy than getting around Steam's limitation, but it's still not going to be worse than just have everyone pirated your game because your infrastructure is totally useless!
If Japan is behind the western world in 5 years in game developing, they must be 15 years behind on the PC department, which is a shame. KOEI actually makes really good strategy games, and I think SystemSoft (I think that's their name) does too, and you wouldn't even have the possibilty of sending money to SystemSoft to them even if you wanted to. I've tried that for the last 10 years!
So first I went to KOEI Taiwan's website. I noted that the screenshots are in Japanese, even though the game is actually in Chinese (for the right version anyway). KOEI Taiwan doesn't sell the game directly but it sells through some company that sounds like it could be some illegitmate operation, but what the heck, it's the official one. I went to the site, and it appears the game is sold out, but there isn't really any indicator anywhere. I can't add it to my shopping cart but then I can't add anything on it anyway. In fact when I click on the shopping cart page it took me to a blank page. So that's no good.
Next I went to the local Chinese bookstore. They used to carry these games but I didn't find any. I thought about asking the guy but I figure since I was responsible for the 3 out of the 10 total sales they ever had in the last 10 years they probably just stopped carrying this stuff. I don't blame them for stop carrying these games.
So then I tried Amazon and found they don't sell them. I tried Play-Asia.com, which was advertising from the MagicBox, and it's out of stock. At this point, my only recourse was piracy unless I was going to call up a relative in Taiwan and have them look for the game, so piracy it is. Of course piracy involves navigating through a mess of shady sites and downloading from other shady sites. Thankfully when a game was pirated by thousand of guys they're usually pretty good at spotting anything like Trojans and stuff, so I think I'm okay here.
The PC industry for Asia (well, I don't know about Korea) seems to be total disarray. When you've an infrastructure that cannot sell you a 2 year old game that appears to be one of the most popular PC games in the area (Asia just don't get many PC games) there's a problem. Why doesn't something like Steam exist? I'd think you'd be able to make a bit more money if you have a halfway decent system, and even if not it's not going to get worse than selling 3 copies of the game in a month. People who are willing to pay also would have a piece of mind knowing they wouldn't have to get the game from a site that is marked as 'DANGEROUS' by any anti-virus scanner. I realize Steam is annoying if you ever forget your password, and it's sometimes easier to just pirate another copy than getting around Steam's limitation, but it's still not going to be worse than just have everyone pirated your game because your infrastructure is totally useless!
If Japan is behind the western world in 5 years in game developing, they must be 15 years behind on the PC department, which is a shame. KOEI actually makes really good strategy games, and I think SystemSoft (I think that's their name) does too, and you wouldn't even have the possibilty of sending money to SystemSoft to them even if you wanted to. I've tried that for the last 10 years!
