What's the status and trend of omakuni in 2024? Back in 2020 I explained what omakuni is, but what happened since then?
Reminder: The simplest description of omakuni is this: If a game can't be bought in Japan for Steam, but can be for consoles, it's omakuni.
Summary
Compared to the past, the omakuni habit is declining. Almost all of new releases of Steam titles can be bought in Japan. From some past important games the omakuni restriction was lifted.
Still, even today some major publishers impose omakuni. For example SPYxANYA Operation_Memories in 2024-06 is so. (Change the url suffix to "cc=jp", then the Store will block you.) Surprise, surprise. Yes, it's again Bandai Namco, a notorious publisher. But this is really exceptional.
Notice that most of past okamuni games remain non-purchasable in Japan. This page at nogameb.com lists most of Omakuni games, amounting to about 200 items as of 2024-10. This simply means game publishers are lazy, not necessarily they're malicious.
Instead publishers are often mean by applying omane (おま値), i.e. a special high price for Japanese residents. They completely segregate Japanese keys from the rest of the world, so that you cannot buy one at lower prices from keyshops. This is the case for the Persona series, Elden Ring, etc. To official retailers sometimes, but not always, are forced sell at the same Japanese price.
Games which were once omakuni, but not any more
(In this section the links are to Japanese sites. Use a translator.*)
Many past releases of the Final Fantasy series were in omakuni, but not now. See e.g. this post at nogameb.com. (There also remain small number of omakuni FF titles.)
Two Sonic games (@denfamicongamer.jp), Dead Space, Three Dragon Ball games, Yakuza 7, and the Total War series (@gamespark.jp) used to be omakuni, but are not any more.
Square-Enix stopped Omakuni?
In the past Square-Enix applied omakuni, but they seem to stopped it now. Some of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series are/were omakuni, but we haven't seen any releases in omakuni from Square-Enix, not limited to FF and DQ, since abount 2019.
Two worst omakuni publishers are Bandai Namco and Sega. But we saw that from Yakuza and Sonic (Sega), and Dragon Ball (Bandai Namco), omakuni was removed.
See also
- Omakuni, a peculiarity of the Japanese PC game market, explained à la Wikipedia
- An omakuni game! How to live with it.
External links
- Omakuni summary (in Japanese) - a voluminous page about the past omakuni situation.
