Okamiden development team struggled with marketing difficulties

By Brenna Hillier

Okamiden producer Motohideo Eshiro and director Kuniomi Matsushita have delivered a post-mortem on Okamiden, touching on the difficulties of marketing a staggered International release on a small budget.

“With the release timing of Okamiden in Japan and the pan-Western territories some six to eight months apart, the challenge of marketing a game twice becomes an issue,” the pair told Gamasutra.

“Since internal development time and resources contribute to the marketing in both markets, the campaign needs careful planning.”

Capcom overcame budgetary and time issues by turning to the original game’s fanbase and ‘the third largest nation in the world’, Facebook.

“Facebook provided, and continues to provide, a platform to make people aware, get people talking and driving praise for the high quality creative assets produced using valuable R&D resources. By utilizing Facebook in this way, the Okami brand now has a global hub for any future titles in the series.”

Part of the marketing problem arose from the game’s staggered international release.

“In the time between the releases of the Japanese version and the pan-Western SKUs, information about the game was posted to the internet. We understood that fact and therefore did not place many restrictions on the information or assets used for overseas PR promotions.”

To avoid posting repeat materials and fatiguing fans, Capcom was forced to create all new promotional assets – trailers and screens – for the second release.

“This is obviously a strain on development resources and something we are more acutely aware of now. … Using development resources to create these assets can tax the development schedule and team resources.

“We all worked very hard to make sure the best possible assets were created for each specific market. We will work to improve on this in the future.”

The post-mortem concluded with a run down of the resources needed to create the DS title. 59 developers worked on the game for just under two years, including 21 programmers and nine event designers.

The game was written in Code Warrior and Maya, among other languages, and contains 415,502 files totalling 45.3 GB.

Okamiden is the DS sequel to the 2006 PS2 and Wii original Okami, which went down a treat with critics but was largely ignored by consumers. It’s out now. Hooray!

Thanks, Go Nintendo.