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PAL RPGamers get the shaft on a consistent basis. This is hardly news to anyone who has ever thought about the inequality among regional releases, yet should not be so. Europe and Oceania are, combined, a larger market than North America (whether that market potential has been achieved requires lengthy scrutinization of sales charts and comparison of regional economic and cultural peculiarities, something I choose to avoid today). Admittedly RPGs are not anywhere close to the market leader in PAL regions, but certain well known personages around RPGamer can attest to the importance of not feeling shafted by release schedules in their nations.
There are two general difficulties in bringing titles to PAL regions that have been released in NTSC regions. There are also individual difficulties experienced by each nation, from national game ratings boards that must be appeased to the possibility of having a title denounced as foreign (this is unlikely, but France in particular seems to specialize in this sort of behavior at the drop of a pin). Delving into the intricacies of every nation in the PAL region would tax the patience of every reader, particularly when I doubt even Bulgarians know what the rules of their nation as applied to video games are.
The first difficulty is the non-trivial issue of translating an RPG for all the users who might want to play it. A non-issue for Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. But French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese, Greek, and Romanian are merely the biggest languages that a publisher might want to entice. Not many RPGs are going to see Czech or Latvian translations. There really isn't a way around this stumbling block, unfortunately. The fact that PAL RPGamers probably have a working grasp of English cannot be taken for granted, particularly the further east in Europe one goes.
The second difficulty is the technical one of PAL electric currents running at 50 Hz while NTSC currents run at 60 Hz. The solution for most game developers is to drop the frame rate in PAL territories from 60 to 50 frames per second thanks to the electrical systems being designed around this. There are ways around this, and apparently converting PAL consoles to deal with NTSC current rates is fairly easy to do. For non-importers the only option is to hope developers take the step of converting the games they desire, however. Nothing ought to catch fire then.
The two biggies, combined with all the individual peculiarities of each nation in the PAL market, help explain why RPGs aren't localized for PAL nations at the rate they are for North America. Which is a most lamentable situation. PAL gamers deserve to have the RPG world opened to them as much as North Americans do.
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