Xseed Games has recently shared a new post over on their official blog, stating that they have encountered a dilemma regarding the release of Story of Seasons: Trio of Town’s DLC in North America.
In Japan, the DLC launched over a period of six months for free in a total of four patches and includes many new features and additions to the game, including a new Bachelor and Bachelorette, new events, new pets, new costumes, new dialogue, and more.
However, the DLC contains roughly 200,000 characters of Japanese text and would take over six figures to localize into English. In the post below taken from the blog, Xseed goes into further detail about their predicament and their possible solutions.
“The total size of the DLC is over 200,000 Japanese characters, making it as large as some games we’ve released. The first Corpse Party, for example, has about 210,000 characters.
The last round of DLC was released in Japan in mid-December, which means that the Japanese text was completed after we’d entered the QA and submission phase of localizing the main game. With DLC of this size, including it in the game would have been impossible under our schedule. It would have forced us to release months after we’d originally planned.
So, will the DLC ever be released in North America? The truth is that we’re still discussing it. Given the size of the DLC, it would cost upwards of six figures to localize it (over half of which is programming and QA costs). For the amount of money and manpower we would need, we could almost release a full other title. The price of the base game in Japan is more than in North America, and they sell about twice as many games as we do here, factors which made it easier for them to release the DLC for free. We are really grateful to fans for their continuing support of the series under its new name, but releasing DLC of this size for free is beyond our means.
This places us squarely between a rock and a hard place. We either don’t localize the DLC at all, or we release it as paid DLC. Neither of these is ideal, but we have to be realistic as a smaller publisher.”
Story of Season: Trio of Towns will release for the Nintendo 3DS in North America on February 28th, 2017.
