Phantasy Star Online 2 coming to Europe/NA in Early 2013

[SSVAV]

At first I wanted a localization.
Then I remembered how poorly SoA handled PSOBB and PSU.
We didn't get half the content updates Japan got and the ones we did get came months/years late.
...then they shut down the servers while the Japanese servers continued to flourish.

That was in the past. I believe SEGA isn't stupid enough not to realize that the North American and European market is a profitable market when it comes to F2P and PC games. At least more than Japan.
Now if they fuck this up the base game has support for multiple languages so it will not be rare to see private servers or hacks of the original client. But I have faith they will not frak this. The website is meh but so are all websites of localized F2P games. The fact SEGA itself is in charge of localization is also a warranty of quality when it comes to UI anyway. Then again we are in 2012 and now it's the West market and no more the East market that dominates PC gaming and more generally console gaming.

Though PSO2 hasn't been announced for China and Korea and I am curious why. They definitively are the best market for F2P games.

 

[Zarcon]

That was in the past. I believe SEGA isn't stupid enough not to realize that the North American and European market is a profitable market when it comes to F2P and PC games. At least more than Japan.
Now if they fuck this up the base game has support for multiple languages so it will not be rare to see private servers or hacks of the original client. But I have faith they will not frak this. The website is meh but so are all websites of localized F2P games. The fact SEGA itself is in charge of localization is also a warranty of quality when it comes to UI anyway. Then again we are in 2012 and now it's the West market and no more the East market that dominates PC gaming and more generally console gaming.

Though PSO2 hasn't been announced for China and Korea and I am curious why. They definitively are the best market for F2P games.

They need to launch the game with the same content as the JPN servers. Or at least fast track the updates so it catches up as soon as possible. I like the game, but the western audience isn't going to like the rate of content updates if they take the same amount of time as the JPN game is taking.
They also need unified servers. A lot of fans have zero faith and will just stick with the JPN version. Combined with the above means a lot of players that actually care about PSO2 won't move due to lack of faith. They need to do everything right from the start and learn from all their past mistakes.
And FFS, give the western release all the content updates. Unified servers would guarantee this. It was so stupid that we didn't get a bunch of things. Kind of understandable for promotional events/items that dealt with JPN only products (still annoying though), but we didn't get some original content updates either.

As I said, I wish them all the best, but Sega has goofed so often now that I wouldn't bet on them.
It'll be F2P so I'll make a character on the western servers, but I'll probably focus on my JPN character since it'll likely be months ahead in content.