Cultre Barrier?

I don't think that there are huge cultural differences in taste. Sometimes when a game seems to do better in one country than in another it's simply about the level of awareness/exposure that it has and that's not always easy to figure out when your marketing has been global. Ground Effect, for example has been popular in Italy due to being featured on a popular Italian gaming site. We can only really tell that by checking the source of YouTube views etc.

My advice, for what it's worth, is just to market your game the best you can and not think about cultural differences unless you think that the content might actually be offensive. In which case, you'd have to ask yourself some serious questions.

 

I don't think so, so much with games, from my experience.
Maybe if you made some mental train simulator, it would be more popular in Japan?

We deffo noticed a cultural barrier with a recent app we released though "Put a Donk on it".....we knew before-hand, but it's a very British thing, and hence most of our sales have been UK based.

 

well, looking at results of our puzzle game - Tiki Totems and I do see some culture differences, for example:

we have seen much, much better places in rankings in countries like France or Italy (we were number 1 and 2 free apps at some point) but at the same time the reception in UK and Japan was lukewarm (top 60 maybe)

 

This is an interesting topic. SteamPunk Hockey in comparison did very well in Japan (#1 games/free/family + fair amount of downloads.