Petitioning Nintendo for a Redress of Grievances: Operation Rainfall

I often sit in doorways when I'm feeling blue.

On June 23, 2011 the story broke: Xenoblade Chronicles Not Coming to North America. The news came in a particularly damning fashion. Mathieu Minel, marketing directer for Nintendo France, was the messenger:

He told the station that Nintendo of Europe wanted to show Xenoblade Chronicles at E3 2011, but Nintendo of America wouldn't let them because they didn't want to show products they aren't planning to sell. -Nintendo World Report

 I remember reading that article back then and feeling my heart sink. I had just recently heard about Xenoblade and was psyched for news of a North American release. I'm a pretty big fan of Xenogears and Xenosaga (which I haven't finished yet... I have all three games but my PS2 gave up the ghost in the middle of Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht) and I had only heard stellar things about the game. But it was not to be... This was just another movement in the death rattle of the Japanese RPG.

Fast forward to June 24, 2011: the very next day. Kotaku runs a story called "How Badly Do You Want The Last Story, Pandora's Tower and Xenoblade For Wii?":

If you think that The Last Story, Pandora's Tower and Xenoblade deserve release outside of Japan and Europe, eager IGN forum goers have already prepared templates for you as part of a three-pronged campaign approach to clearly, but politely request Nintendo localize those games. -Kotaku

The Last Story was directed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and scored by the series' long-time composer Nobuo Uematsu. I had to slap myself in the forehead for not knowing about this. Pandora's Tower, according to the European website, is a "dark, original RPG adventure" that, while seemingly the black sheep of the trio, sounds fairly interesting. I had not even heard of the either of them, but that's beside the point. It really only took one day and one sentence to energize the gaming community enough to start a movement to bring these games to North America.

Snazzy!

The movement is called "Operation Rainfall". They whipped themselves up a neat logo and began petitioning Nintendo of America to localize those three titles. Operation Rainfall helped drive Monado: Beginning of the World (Xenoblade's development name) up to the #1 best-selling video game on Amazon.com... in a few hours.

It's one thing to petition a gigantic corporation with some letters and phone calls. It's an entirely different thing when you put your money where your mouth is. And it seemed to worked since now Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story are coming to America.

This is an interesting model, isn't it? Imagine what would happen if Half-Life 2: Episode 3 were to suddenly appear on Amazon.com as an in-development title and fans blew up the pre-order button in much the same way fans of Xenoblade did. Do you think that this is a good way to gauge interest in a game? Especially one that has been forthcoming for awhile?  Comment away.