Piri, I'm not even going to respond to your commentary, as it's so poorly informed and almost offensively presented. Actually... not even "almost".
Japan has people on the net, money, and about 5 times the population of the biggest European BuzzerBeater nations.
One thing many Japanese don't have is freetime, working Japanese...work a lot. Long hard hours.
But we have colleges, we have housewives, we have kids that live with their parents till they pass away, we have geeks, lots and lots of geeks.
We have people that might be interested in playing this game, or atleast trying it. Thousands easily hsould be able to be drawn through the turnstiles. Maybe only hundreds will stick. Or maybe thousands who knows.
Japan's user numbers make it similar to other nations like Bahamas in BB, but in the world and economically, its more like the Canada or Australia. Its a big nation with money.
Unfortunately, (well fortunately is some regards I guess) BB is not run nor managemed professionally, it is not treated like a business...and for that reason it doesn't have as much success as it would were it treated and managed like a proper business.
Business sense would dictate a strong push in Japan to grab up supporting users, paying customers. And to establish a good user base for selling adds.
So glad Wolph brought up these points. Except, Japan's population is far, far greater than that of Canada or Australia - the possibilities that exist in this nation for this to succeed are huge. If only...
I am interested geniunely to find out what kind of adds I will see when my supporter runs out. I want to see if they got any good Japanese sponsor or anything.
I believe that they are using Adsense, which is one of the most incredibly inefficient ways for a website to make money off advertising. They need to get out there and negotiate this themselves, which is highly unlikely. There's very little activity within the game itself, I can't see there being a lot outside of it. Kinda besides the point, but it all points to an unwillingness (for whatever reasons) to expand in non-traditional BB nations.
España Active Teams: 4239
Nippon Active Teams: 34
best thing is to try & promote the game & get more users really with about 100 the game would work fine
maybe in the offseason so they all start with new teams @ the start when rookies are cheap to buy & they dont look at a horrible record have some sort of promotion in japan on all the local websites that cover bball
More numbers that you really should consider:
España population: 46,030,109
Nippon population: 127,960,000
It's the 10th biggest country in the world, and those within the 18-35 age bracket have an incredibly high disposable income, and most have more than enough time to spare for a game such as BB.
As Wolph said: Japan's a cashcow, could be huge. But currently? The community is probably at least 60% expats from English-speaking nations. There's been no effort at all to expand the game here in any way, shape or form.
Worse still, the majority of the few teams that do join up get put into a situation that almost guarantees they'll leave within their first month in BB.
Such a shame...
http://with-malice.com/ - The half-crazed ramblings of a Lakers fanatic in Japan