This is really interesting. Here in Brazil we have a strong "japanese food" industry, obviously inclined to our western way; it's always amusing to see how important it is for the people who created it in the first place.
This game is terrible, but I played it around 200 hours with some friends. It's quite fun when you do it social, but we defined some rules:
- Never get into servers with more than 40% of the slots occupied (resulting in a lesser chance of stumbling over hackers)
- Keep always a low profile and avoid the big cities
- Go for a safe zone at least one time per hour
It was fun, and I miss those days. Too bad the game doesn't kept us interested on playing it because of the lack of good news. Still I'm pretty sure Sergei made a buckload of money with it.
I think this raises the old conversation about exposing your idea in the wind. In this case, directly to a company who can actually put it to work really fast.