Halo 3 will be released in a few weeks, supported by a marketing campaign so large and unprecedented for the video game industry that the Wall Street Journal saw fit to publish an article focussing solely on the game’s advertising, entitled “Here Comes ‘Halo 3’ – With a Side Order of Fries”. This has, naturally, resulted in a lot of cynical reactions from some corners of the hardcore community, especially those who feel Halo is already too mainstream– a game for jocks and frat boys, for people who don’t know what the really good stuff is. But regardless of one’s personal taste for the series, we should recognize that something very important is going on here.

Sometimes it seems like Western video game businesses love to sink money into Japan. From Microsoft’s well-documented and long-running tale of woe trying to sell its Xbox and Xbox 360 there, to Electronic Arts’ multiple aborted strategies for the region (including recently starting up and closing down a complete internal studio, with nary a product to show for it), one gets the sense of a lost cause that can’t be dropped. Why keep trying? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal summed it up this way: “The Japanese market is less than half of the size of the U.S. market, but Microsoft has been unwilling to give up on it because many of the top software makers are based there, and Japan holds huge symbolic value as one of the big videogame cultures.”