...Mainly for not localizing any Tales Of games. Let me explain. Recently, as you may have heard, Namco announced 3 new titles in the Tales Of series, one of which was a remake of a title in the series from this generation that also has not seen a US/Europe release. Needless to say, fans of the series were incensed at this news. During the past week, said fans have tried desperately to get Namco's attention via various methods, such as spamming their Facebook wall relentlessly [I swear, there are at least 3 new posts every minute!], a survey about the Tales series to be sent to Namco themselves, a Playstation Blog "Idea", and a GameFAQs poll. Normally, this would sound like standard fan ranting, but there's something different about it this time. What's different you ask? Well, listen to this. The aforementioned survey got over 4,057 responses, the PSBlog idea got 2,087 votes, their Facebook wall got an unmeasurable amount of posts, and the GameFAQs poll got a shocking 18,433 votes for the Tales Of series alone, and won the poll by a vast margin. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it! I have never seen such support for a series, without an adequate response from the company. Mind you, most fans probably contributed to all of these, but even with such a worst-case scenario, that's still 14,386 responses! The best case scenario is 24,577 responses, by the way. That is several thousand people essentially pledging to buy the games if they are released. And this is a small fraction of what would ultimately be the sales of the games. Hell, if Namco actually invested more than pocket change in the games' marketing budgets, who knows how well they would sell? Now, I have tried to think about this rationally, from Namco's perspective; I tried to frame the situation in a strictly financial sense. But even then, it doesn't make sense for them to not localize them! They could even let another company like XSEED, Atlus, or Nippon Ichi localize them, and save a bundle on costs. At this point, Namco's not being greedy, they're just being stupid. Here's the link to most of the story so far:
http://scrawlfx.com/2010/08/the-battle-for-tales-localization