SE Charges $30 For "Tomb Raider" Japanese Language Pack

"Tomb Raider" Gets Japanese Language Pack on Steam… for 30 Bucks
Optional add-on includes Japanese voice track with subtitles

The version of Tomb Raider on Steam sports a variety of voices and subtitle options. German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Arabic get both. Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Czech, and Portugese are there in subtitle form only. Japanese, however, is nowhere to be found, but that all changes on April 25.

Tomb Raider goes on sale in Japan on that date, but the packaged version, which includes Japanese language options, will be priced at a steep $80. Meanwhile, Tomb Raider is $50 on Steam, so Square Enix is offsetting the difference in pricing by charging Japanese gamers $30 to download the language pack add-on and play the game in their native tongue.

Sure, it makes sense if you roll it around in your head long enough to justify it, but it's still a very Square Enix way to get an extra 30 bucks out of players in Japan.

30 dollars for a language pack, pretty stupid

don't give them any ideas or they'll charge us for the English pack once FFXIV is done !

FFXI Auto-Translator DLC.

:shudder:

Maybe they need the money to fix auto-translate in this game? D:

I'd actually pay that if they did the reverse for their JRPGs lol

Edit: Uh I mean the same? Whatever lol you guys know what I mean >:|

i wouldn't mind playing a 5-10$ premium for jrpg to actually come to the states at a reasonable time :/

Games here are 90 bucks new so importing an NA release with Japanese audio wouldn't be so bad >.>

It's like they are begging to go under. Enjoy XI while it lasts. Of course, it'll never be F2P before that happens.

I would say the chances of a huge name like SE going under and never coming back are slim. I'm pretty sure they would be bought out again before that could happen.

part of reviewing what what works for the company!

for those who dont like the 13 series, better hope the next one doesnt sell well, we may never see an end to it!

It's not meant for non-Japanese customers; it's meant to hinder Japanese customers who would buy internationally off of Steam to circumvent the higher Japanese retail price. The game wasn't even made by SE in-house, but by eidos' Crystal Dynamics, so the JP track isn't even the "original" or anything, it's just a shitty dub.

Not that I approve or anything, I hope this type of backwards handling of the global marketplace is done away with in the new management shift.

SE is taking microtransactions to a whole new level I see.

And I thought their 5 euro hitman language packs were bad enough......

Retail Version $80; Digital Version $50; Add $30 for JP Language

When crap like this happens it makes me happy to know i get my games for free. <3 you torrents

This.
Publishers seem to absolutely looooooove alienating their legitimate consumers, bottle necking more and more people into piracy.

Hopefully someday they'll realize that what they face isn't a piracy problem, but rather a service problem.

As much as I hate to admit, I most certainly would pay if they were to do this with some of their "Square Soft" titles that never made it across the pond. More specifically, the Romancing Saga series (the precursor to Saga Frontier), Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2), Front Mission 1 and 2, and Bahamut Lagoon.

inb4 translated ROMs. I don't support that kind of gaming.

Curious.
Is it a matter of authenticity (ie: canon only) or a matter of moral judgment in regards to copying protected works?

Both. I want the official story with an official translation straight from the source it came from.

And say what you will while throwing around terms like "soapbox" and "self righteous", but I just don't think its right to do that kind of thing, with regard to ROM programs. I own hard copies of every game you'll ever hear me talking about. My house looks like an old school Playmore Recycled Games store. My bed room, living room, and den all have different gaming generations hooked up.

Currently, I have fully functional NES, SNES, Genesis w/CD, Neo Geo AES, Turbo Duo, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameCube, PS1 (original rectangular one with serial port), PS2, and PS3 all hooked up. I long since got rid of the N64, Wii, 3DO, XBox, and 360. They all had crappy controllers and/or games in my opinion. And after sampling it at my sister in law's house, I'm not even touching Wii U.

I certainly won't hold it against anyone that plays on either side of the fence, as there is perfectly valid reasons for both sides.
My two primary conditions of resorting to piracy is one of two things.

• Predatory marketing
  (On disc-DLC, Day-one DLC, False advertising, Utterly broken gameplay, Skewed content to cost ratio, poor QA, bad coding in a port, etc. etc.)

• Unavailable through every available conventional means.
  Typically a lack of localization or regional distribution. (Mother 3 is a decent example of this)
  

Other than that, my principles aside, I would much rather have my hard earned cash go in support of developers that put heartfelt time and effort into great games; despite the distribution of that money waxing heavily in favor of publishers, licensers, and distributors.

^completely this.
i've been an avid gaming addict nearly since before i could walk. owned my first NES in 1988 3 years after i was born. and from that point up until the current generation of systems when you bought a game, you got the whole damn game -.- all of it, not just 1/2 a game that you had to then pay out the *** for the rest of it. all the stuff that ppl buy that is now DLC used to be "unlockable" stuff you got for completion of the game or challenges within. it's just some total BS that game companies do to squeeze more money out of us, cause the initial $60 (or whatever price you paid) just wasn't enough...

and on the issue of piracy, perhaps if whenever they're making a game, they do the translations alongside the actual production of the product itself they wouldn't run into this problem so often. yes i'm aware it takes money to translate a game, but isn't that mostly because they worry about rushing a game out so fast that the translation would end up being done after the game is made? then it'd have to be ported to whatever language after sales have started, and at that point why invest more money in a product already being sold right? i'm no programmer, game maker or whatever, but i would think if whenever they're developing the storyboard for the game wouldn't it be a better idea to work on the translation as the story itself is developed? you could then target a larger audience across the globe, thus making more money, for a slightly longer time investment. there are so many good games that the rest of the non asian world has missed out on simply cause "they didn't feel like it" or whatever halfassed reasoning they used...

about time JPs get *** like us NA players... its kinda below the belt... but hey.. welcome to our world!

You're only getting *** if you buy into it. No one is forcing you to buy these games/dlc/whatever.

Sure you want to play them,but thats on you for giving in

Edit: And before anyone gives the old "the no one forcing you excuse eh?" That is exactly what it is. You think enough of the product to be offset by the abuse. Pros vs Cons is all it is.

Spin, spin. That doesn't mean that the extra $30 is because of the language pack at all, people are just seeing what they want to see.

*Package versus Digital Download - Tomb Raider is still $59.99 at most retailers (Gamestop and Amazon being the exception), which makes the difference $20, not $30. Steam also drops prices much, much faster than retail. That's why everyone loves Steam.

*The thread title is fairly misleading if the article is to be believed: people in Japan aren't having to buy a $30 DLC, the game just has a higher suggested retail price. This could be due to any number of factors, but my guess would be due to the changes in the value of currency between Japan and the US.

*As of right now, the PC version of Tomb Raider is ¥3,999, which is about $40. This is from Amazon.jp, which makes it cheaper than what Amazon is selling it for in the US.

People just want to be angry about something, and love to jump on the bandwagon. As there's no actual link in the OP, I don't know where the news originated, but it's just trying to post something "controversial" in order to get hits.

EDIT: Found it on Kotaku, of course. So yeah. They're just trying to generate clicks, as they always do. Sensationalist media is their forte.

Square Tax.

While, yes, the solution is logical and essentially completes the missing puzzle piece of the game while maintaining suggested retail price equilibrium, it doesn't change the fact that the suggested price tag for the given content (language pack of all things), is extremely skewed.

Price should always be relative to received content. Sadly, in most cases, this is simply not true. Especially not in this one.

What this is, is a greedy publisher (SE), wanting their cake and the ability to eat it too, for not having their ***together and properly localized throughout worldwide regions, and sticking their ***-up to Japanese wallets. Simply ***.