Topic: Can Australian release dates be added to the games on this site?

Nintendo has 4 main regions, or parts of it's company. Nintendo Japan, NintendoUK/Nintendo of Europe, Nintendo of America and Nintendo ANZ. NintendoLife has release dates for 3 of these 4 main regions. The 4th region of ANZ has no release dates listed for games on NintendoLife.

My request is for NintendoLife to recognise all 4 regions like Nintendo do. (Even Aonuma recognised Australia with his recent video thanking the Australian fans). So can NintnndoLife treat all 4 regions equally by adding the Australian release dates to games in the the future?

@the8thark hey, thanks for the feedback - we actually only really add release dates for US and UK. UK dates and European are pretty much always the same, so covers the vast majority of our audience. We don't really track Japanese release dates, but we do add them sometimes for big games that take a while to come to the west.

As you can imagine, it would be a reasonable amount of extra work to keep Aus/NZ dates up to date too... do you know roughly how they tend to differ from US/UK dates? Are they that different?

Thanks!

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate it.

Actually it would not be that much more work. Someone only has to check the EB games Australia website - www.ebgames.com.au - and the Nintendo Australia website for the digital releases - www.nintendo.com.au. You'd only have to do this for future releases as most of the old games are already released worldwide by now. But there might be a better solution as I have listed below.

In the past they used to be quite different for select releases, but now they tend to be roughly the same as UK/Europe release dates. Australia follows the PAL UK/Europe release these days. This is because Australia is also PAL. The NTSC North American release schedule can be quite different at times.

This makes a lot of sense. Maybe then you could just list the UK/Europe release date as theUK/Europe/Australia date instead Most of the time you would be correct so there would be no extra work to be done, apart from adding in one word. It's very rare for Australia to have a wildly different date to the UK/Europe now. But if that is the case I can certainly let you know, I can do the research. I am Australian (as you have probably guessed by now) so it's not hard for me to do this. This might be the better solution.

These are just my two cents of the issue. If you choose to do nothing,

It's very rare that the dates are different from Europe anyways. Even Indies which used to sometime not even launch here will almost always come out on the same day now. And even when it doesn't it's usually only a couple of days here or there.

Though we have got hardware and mobile content VERY early recently. That's about the only major difference.

@skywake what are you talking about if i may ask ?

@matty33
Look at thread topic. Not getting games or getting them late here was super common pre-switch.

Eg: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_U_software
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games

These days? Not so much. If anything we tend to sometimes get some stuff early. Eg 3DS hardware, Mobile games. Just not usually games.

@skywake ok thanks i can't see anything about the 3ds ?

@matty33
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Nintendo_3DS

As an Australian, I'd say that it's unnecessary for such a small audience. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the release dates are in sync with Europe. There are very few exceptions to this, as we tend to (still!) miss out on mainly retail releases (NBA 2K18 Gold Legends Edition wasn't released on the Aussie eShop either, which is completely baffling), while a very small number of games may be released earlier (or exclusively) in Australia where the Australian copy is basically a EU region locked version of the US release. The only examples I can think of since the inception of the 3DS and Wii U are entries in the Scribblenauts and Yokai Watch series, which have experienced significant delays in Europe, and the publishers have opted for a release closer to the U.S. for the Australian release. I'm not sure if Scribblenauts Unmasked was ever released in Europe.

We are also deprived of some eShop sales, as well as games in the Nintendo Selects range, where the selection often differs between regions (we usually get the Selects versions some time after Europe, if at all).

Vooks, which is an Australian site, provides more comprehensive coverage on Australian releases, including weekly updates of the Australian eShops if you're interested.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, sounds like in the world of Switch it's less of an issue... therefore we could update the label, but then it won't be 100% accurate. Hmm.

Here is how the release dates are currently done:
https://i.imgur.com/nHyNxo0.jpg

Here is how the release dates could be improved. Two different options for improvement.
https://i.imgur.com/oEUGwOU.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/88fEDts.jpg

For games with Japanese releases you even list that. Take Super Mario Odyssey for example.
https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/nintendo-switch/super_mar...
You list the Japan, US, UK/EU releases. That's 3 out of 4 of the main Nintendo regions listed. No Aus listed.

This is just a suggestion for NL to actually put the 5 seconds extra effort in to list the dates for all 4 of the Nintendo main regions around the world. (or as many regions of the 4 that have release dates).

I wouls also argue that the Japanese audience that NL has is equally as small. But the Japanese release dates are there.

@the8thark I've added AU to the PAL label within Switch games, eg: https://www.nintendolife.com/games/nintendo-switch/super_mario...