In Brief: Localisation gone loco?

In this brief discussion, I really am talking about ‘assets’ on game cases. And I’m not on about the artwork samples, so to speak.

A few weeks back, the Heavy Rain box art for Europe was unveiled, and it looked good.  The cover was elegant in its simplicity and resembled a piece of artwork itself.  Along comes the American cover version and you’ve guessed it… the lowest common denominator was used.  The marketers perhaps saw just a ‘boring’ origami crane in the rain.  The solution it seemed, was to put a woman with a wet, tight-fitting blouse on the front instead.  Puh-lease!  It insult’s everyone’s intelligence.

It may look like I’m slagging off Americans, but what I’m trying to get across is that whoever is responsible for this marketing decision needs to treat their audience with a bit more respect.  The game is solely aimed at an adult audience, but I thought we were going to get more maturity in games, not more smut.