Thoughts on differences between Western and Japanese home computer markets

Okay, so last month (December of 2025), I saw a few screenshots of PC-98 games and went wondering: “in comparison, why do Western home computer games of the same era (the kind that you’d see on an Amiga or Atari ST) tend to be so ‘meh’-looking?”, in comparison to both console games of the same era and PC games that would come out shortly after games like DOOM would prove the PC was actually a viable mainstream gaming platform?".

I think I finally have some kind of answer to that question.

Let’s start off with a computer/console distinction. Developing console games is not an easy task regardless of region – a developer needs to obtain a license from the console’s manufacturer and follow a strict set of rules to let the game be released in the first place. It is well-known that in North America and Europe, Nintendo imposed a strict set of rules on what kind of content was allowed in its games, as well as limited how many games a publisher could release each year (which led Konami to create “dummy companies”, like “Ultra Games” in NA and “Palcom” in EU, to get around that limit).

While it may seem that the Japanese game industry had fewer restrictions from all the stories of games being edited during the JP -> NA or JP -> EU localization process, it’s also clear that they also had rules of their own – outright “adult” games were not allowed in any region, and NA -> JP localization edits were also a thing – most notably, one of the Mortal Kombat games on the SNES was edited to fade into gray-scale during fatalities, presumably to avoid red blood.

It is also known, at least in regards to Nintendo, that applying to become a third-party developer for the Famicom was even harder than for the NES. According to the Famicom World database, it took over a year from the Famicom’s release for the first third-party company (Hudson Soft) to get to release a title on Nintendo’s machine, and according to the information in the video game collection Tetris Forever, it took Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software (a company which, by then, was already well-known in the Japanese home computer world, and would eventually develop Tetris for the Famicom and the Game Boy) a personal meeting with Nintendo’s president Hiroshi Yamauchi to even be allowed to develop a Go video game for the Famicom – one could imagine that, had Rogers and Yamauchi not have a shared interest in this Japanese board game, the history of gaming could have ended up very differently.

Of course, unlicensed video games existed in both the West and Japan, and it seems like in both cases, console manufacturers at the time, who controlled the publishing, had the same solution – stores that sold unlicensed video games would be threatened with having their supply of licensed games terminated – hence the reason why Color Dreams, a U.S.-based developer and publisher, felt the need to become a “Christian games” developer, rebrand itself as “Wisdom Tree” and start selling their games to Christian book stores, as these would not be hurt by any threats from Nintendo, and why Japanese unlicensed games, such as “Hong Kong 97”, seem to have also needed to discover alternative means of publishing – that’s why the only “cover art” of that game is not a cartridge label, and the game itself indicates it was originally published on floppy disk, perhaps to be used with a game backup device.

Home computers, of course, do not have that limitation. Games are typically sold on floppy disks or cassettes, which are both writable media and were available widely to anyone as generic storage media. While a computer game developer may want to sign up with a publisher for easier distribution of their software, it is never a requirement.

So, in both cases, it was easier to develop for home computers first. If a home video game company didn’t start off by making arcade games (like Atari, Capcom, Sega, Midway, etc.), it would normally start off with home computer games (like HAL Laboratory¹, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Rare, etc.).

During that era in the U.S., home computer software was often seen as a “budget option” (and in Europe, often as “the only affordable option”) – typical prices for ZX Spectrum or C64 or Amiga games could range anywhere from $1 to $15 (or £1 to £15 in the UK, or a comparable amount elsewhere in Europe), whereas (at least based on data from mail-order catalogues of the time) NES games could cost from $25 to $50 – and in Europe, these tended to be even more expensive. Part of the reason why the Sega Master System did better in Europe compared to the NES (and even then, home computer did even better) was, apparently, because Sega’s European publishers understood that European audiences at the time would not pay American prices for their games.

So, in the West at least, it would seem obvious to me that games for home computers would be developed more quickly and with a lower budget than console games. Another factor I haven’t mentioned so far is piracy – after all, it’s much easier to copy a diskette or cassette than a game cartridge. For the latter, the bootlegger would need to both replicate a PCB as well as to source equivalent ROM and mapper chips. A story I’ve heard frequently about these times is that it could take weeks or even days before a home computer game became widely pirated, and the developer’s profits shrank significantly. It makes sense to me that this would lead to a more quantity-based approach to game development.

This also seems to be the reason why Western home computer developers’ first efforts on consoles tend to be rather underwhelming, as they’d be unprepared for the longer development cycles and higher budgets of console games.

But then I decided to take a look at some Japanese advertisement posters for their games and discovered that their prices seem to be the other way around – home computer games being more expensive than console games!

For example, some of the PC-98 games, most of them visual novels, have price tags of ¥7800, ¥10800, ¥14800…

And then for Japanese console games, I saw ¥6800 for Pokemon Stadium on the N64, ¥7800 for Rockman 5 on the Famicom, ¥8800 for Phantasy Star 2 on the Megadrive…

(Speaking of, I just took a look at Tetris Forever again, it also has advertisements for different Tetris games released in Japan. The Famicom cartridge of BPS’s original Tetris was priced at ¥4900. The MSX2 release, both on cartridge and disk format, is ¥6800, as are releases on other home computers.)

I can imagine that prices for visual novels might be inflated by the fact that some of them are “adult products” containing not-safe-for-work material, but I’m bewildered by the overall idea of a game on a floppy disk – or even a set of floppy disks – costing the same as an entire game cartridge full of custom hardware. You would imagine that this environment would lead to downright rampant copying of games, right?

Since writing the original post, it still shocks me, but I can only imagine one possibility: perhaps in Japan, generic floppy disks were also very expensive, to the point that making a copy of a game to sell to others would not be a economically viable endeavor. Or maybe there was a much greater stigma associated with piracy. Or, perhaps, the fact that the home computer market was a lot more fragmented meant that it wasn’t as viable to pirate games back then.

Either way, I guess that could explain why the games on Japanese home computers of the 1980s and early 1990s seem to come across as more elaborate than those on Western home computers of the same time period.