The eccentric Yakuza series has broken 14 million units of lifetime sales, according to a report by Sega.
In that same report, Sega notes that the game series is rated highly by overseas users, despite being incredibly Japanese in culture.
According to PC Gamer, the report also shows that over 20% of these sales are from the last 2 years alone, when Yakuza 6 first debuted in English.
Similar to the Persona series, the Yakuza series has a very strong emphasis on Japanese culture, making it quite the challenge to localize.
Another similarity of the two is Sega’s increase in allotment of localization resources in recent years, with Persona 5 getting the option to use Japanese dubs with English subtitles, and the greater international marketing push for Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon.
The game is also available on Xbox for the first time in the series’ 15-year history.
Between this and the success of Persona 4 Golden on Steam, the numbers are showing that even niche games have a chance to do well if the effort is put in to get them out there.
However, games like Persona and Yakuza are both incredibly difficult games to localize also because of their size, both being large RPGs with a lot of dialogue.
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