From IGN

Luke Karmali wrote:

Nintendo has claimed that fan campaigns and petitions have no impact on the company's business decisions.

That's according to Nintendo of America head Reggie Fils-Aime, who told Siliconera that fan requests had little effect on whether the company localised titles or not.

The comments were made following questions about Operation Rainfall: a fan campaign that sought the localisation of Japanese Wii games Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower. As all three titles were eventually released in the West, the campaign has long been heralded a success. According to Fils-Aime though, it had little impact.

"I have to tell you - it doesn't affect what we do," he said. "We certainly look at it, and we're certainly aware of it, but it doesn't necessarily affect what we do.

"I wanted to bring Xenoblade here. The deal was, how much of a localisation effort is it? How many units are we going to sell, are we going to make money? We were literally having this debate while Operation Rainfall was happening, and we were aware that there was interest for the game, but we had to make sure that it was a strong financial proposition.

"I'm paid to make sure that we're driving the business forward - so we're aware of what's happening, but in the end we've got to do what's best for the company. The thing we know [about petitions] is that 100,000 signatures doesn't mean 100,000 sales."

It's not hugely surprising to discover that game companies don't set much store by fan petitions, seeing as we're still without an announcement about GTA V on PC, despite a petition to Rockstar having received over 600,000 signatures.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/12/05/nintendo-isnt-affected-by-fan-campaigns-or-petitions

IMO fans shouldnt be able to dictate when something comes out when they want it to, its ignorance and an example of how spoiled gamers are nowadays.

From what I remember about it, it wasn't about WHEN they were going to come out, it was about whether they were going to AT ALL. Like, Xenoblade for example. Europe had its own version (in english) at launch, but America didn't get it for about 8 months.

It's also a bit of a letdown when we don't have a game that the rest of the world has, and nearly everyone who has it is calling it the best game of the generation.

While I agree that a company should be allowed to do what they want to produce, seeing as they're the ones manufacturing, I think that fans making complaints aren't spoiled. We're the ones BUYING the game, we're the ones SPENDING money on the game, we'd like to at least have it the way we want it. Otherwise we just won't buy it, if that makes us "spoiled" for not wanting to buy something we don't like, so be it.

It does help show that there is some sort of demand there for a wanted game, at least, but it should never make a company decide to sell something in a particular region. Like the dude said, signatures on a screen don't equal direct sales.

It's like a discussion we had about Nintendo in another thread. I can harp on all day about them needing to freshen their IPs. They could listen and do exactly that, but that doesn't guarantee a sale lol.