As for the Sega Saturn, observers here blame everything from bad marketing and weak distribution channels, to poor relations with American game developers. In addition, the Saturn's reliance on Japanese arcade games made the characters more familiar in Japan than they were in North America. Sega will try again with its new Dreamcast machine, and in the mean time has worked hard to impart an American flavor to some of its games, even when they are developed in Japan. Of course, not every game will play in every country. But American football has not caught on beyond North America, and neither has its video counterpart.
Conventional wisdom has it that American gamers want action.
Japanese gamers seem to care a lot more about the characters and plot. For example, consider the U.S.-developed game Crash Bandicoot. Crash's girlfriend appears in the original game, but was dropped from the sequel. In North America, Sony didn't have to explain her absence because gamers were playing mostly for the action, not just the story. But in Japan, they had to explain her fate in the manual.