Five Advantages of Being a PAL Gamer

March 13th, 2008

pal gamers flags

This article was originally titled “The Top 10 Advantages of Being a PAL Gamer” but as you might have guessed I fell short at five.

There is a long tradition in the video game industry with consumers and the PAL encoding system. That is people whom live in PAL territories (that is Europe, Australia, New Zealand among others) more often than not end up drawing the short straw. Unlike our NTSC counterparts it often takes a long time for new technology to reach our shores and even when it does our price is marked up, we have lower distribution numbers and often receive modified/downgraded content. Basically it is the manufacturer’s way of telling us that we are simply not a priority for them.

On the rare occasion though us PAL gamers might be treated to something that trumps our American and Japanese friends. These special treats are rare cases indeed, thinking up even a measly five perks has been a formidable challenge. But the advantages are there, just a little hard to find. ^_^

I’d also like to thank the forum members over at PALGN whom suggested a few ideas and helped with the brainstorming process.

Early/Exclusive Releases

Although it had taken a long time for this trend to set in, occasionally in the industry you will notice that some PAL (especially European and Australian) games are released a few days earlier than their respective American counterpart. Fifteen years ago, excluding European developed games this trend was not existent but in the past 6 years early European releases have taken off and continue to occur quite frequently.

There are a couple of reasons as to why this situation is turning around. Firstly the increase of European game development. Take a flick through the back of any EDGE magazine and you will notice just how many AAA developers are situated in the UK. Then there is the strength of the Playstation brand in PAL territories.

I could fill a whole separate article on the latter point but I will try to be brief here. Basically for years game companies had neglected the PAL markets. When the Playstation was produced, the situation started to slowly change. Sony actually viewed and treated the PAL market for what it was; a solid, viable area for strong game sales. Hence it didn’t take much for Sony to become and still maintain the European market with it’s Playstation brand.

Years later, prior to the release of the Gamecube, Nintendo Europe was noticing slow adoption rates of Nintendo consoles compared to other territories. NOE representatives admitted that the UK markets had been previously neglected by Nintendo (release dates particularly) and in an attempt to turn the tides they changed the way that they viewed Europe and PAL territories. As a result the UK started to see several earlier releases for significant Gamecube and GBA titles, some games even launched first in Europe and then to the rest of the world. In the meantime Phil Harrison (of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) pushed for a greater emphasis on mass market Playstation 2 devices (Eye Toy, Buzz, Singstar etc.). This payed off for Sony and these games were and still are a huge success in the UK and Australia. The success of these titles (as well as Nintendo’s new found interest in Europe) ensured that earlier PAL releases would continue to occur and have done so ever since.

Along with this, PAL territories do occasionally receive PAL exclusive titles and they are listed as well:

pal exclusives and early releases

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