Okay, so before I do this, I should point to my EU writeup
a month ago.
The intuition is roughly correct, yes. EU has a lot of similiarties with NA, but PC games have a stronger root in the EU at large. Consoles arrived here later, but from around the N64 era European consumer habits started reflecting that of American ones. There's still some room for variation, of course, but by this point the EU market is relatively uniform because the online playerbase play each other mostly and because the console manufacturers often promote continent-wide. PlayStation for example promotes its brand through advertising in the premier European football / soccer competition - the UEFA Champions League - and have done so since the PS1 days.
Western Europe's probably the region that most closely resembles America - but there are some regional variations at play. As I wrote in the writeup, I wouldn't be surprised if Layton's popular in Europe - especially in France and neighboring countries - due to his similarities with Franco-Belgian comics like Tintin. Layton's not the sole case, although it's difficult to say how many such cases there are.
Western Europe's also the larger half by sheer population - Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain thusly form the core of the European console market with neighboring nations and regions more or less following. Nintendo have been very quick with providing German, French and Spanish (as well as Italian) translations in their games since at least the GCN era, which helps.
What I didn't go into in my writeup was Eastern Europe / Russia (I'll use the usual definition: the former Eastern Bloc / Soviet-controlled nations). That region is even more computer-centric - especially Russia. While I'm not that familiar with Eastern Europe's general gaming at large, it's apparently
here that those weird PC games really come into the fore:
That's not to say that there aren't console users in the region - there absolutely are. However, here the computer becomes more prominent (probably because of sheer historical inertia and generally less money to burn). As such, most of the European console base is based in Western Europe. Still, Poland's rather large in its own right, and the other Eastern European countries also have signifcant gaming populations.
Apparently the Witcher books have a cult following in the region (which wouldn't surprise me since most books were released in the 90s, and the first Witcher game in 2007), so it wouldn't surprise me if Geralt is indeed more popular there.
I've talked some about Russia in the past, but it bears repating (heh): It's difficult to overstate just
how much the PC dominates the Russian video game sphere. One reason Counter-Strike and DOTA took off in Russia is because they were very easily downloaded / pirated. Consequently, Steam has a large presence in Russia too. Again, sheer historical inertia and less money to burn. Outside of CS, DOTA and World of Tanks, Fortnite, PUBG and Hearthstone does well there apparently. Localization is key here, the Russian audience is much less familiar with English than the Western or even Eastern European audiences.
The console of choice is the PlayStation - and while Nintendo has established a presence in the homeland of Tetris, Nintendo has struggled quite a lot there.
To say the least. Still, Nintendo's not entirely out of the game here - Nintendo's started to translate games into Russian, with Ultimate being one of the first - although it's clear that they're the underdog.
I should also mention Turkey due to its historical and current ties to Europe - and the fact that Turkey and the Middle East is sometimes included in Europe's sales data. Like Russia, Turkey's generally a PC / computer-leaning country due to - once more - sheer inertia and less money to burn. And very much like Russia, the key to success appears to be localization / translation (which is why
LoL, PUBG / Fortnite and the Witcher apparently did pretty well in Turkey). Nintendo's apparently had it a bit rocky there, so it'll take some time I think until they have a foothold there.
Mobile gaming's got a major foothold in Europe too (as it's done everywhere - seriously, mobiles being ubiquotous and there being loads of free / F2P mobile games on the app stores are massive reasons.). Not much to say here, mobile's probably the most uniform format.
Wait, does that mean that WBaWC Reimu's disrespect game will be 10 times better than EoSD Reimu's?
I'm sold either way.
