Hi, I did release a computer game in the steam distribution platform. Now I ask myself how do japanese exactly search for games commonly. For instance if a japanese searches for „pacman“ does the japanese enter the romaji symbols (i do not know now , maybe パックマン) meaning pacman or will preferrable the westen roman „pacman“ be preferred?
Okay, pacman is basically a japanese product of the early eighties I would assume that japanese typing in romaji style pacman of the native language. But what do japanese typically enter whe searching e.g. for Portal 2 (a US popular video game)?
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Currently in a room with 22 Japanese teenagers, asking live. Give me a minute.
Done. No one knows Portal 2 (to be expected, since the domestic market is so big and loud), but all would search for ポータル2 if they knew how to pronounce it.
Adding to this: they might try the romaji if not sure how to transcribe the word, e.g. Halo (ハロ？ヘイロウ？ヘイロー？) but it would never be the first nor the most natural choice.
in principle — a term the JP love to prepend to statements — they search in their native language — kanji, hiragana, katakana. few here speak English at even the intermediate level, so unlikely they would suddenly use eigo/the English language, to do a search. JP searches allow for mistakes by Japanese natives inputting words the wrong but common romaji characters.
One note just to keep in mind is that “romaji” are roman characters, but “katakana” is the native script (パックマン, etc) that often writes out foreign words.