You're absolutely correct about monochrome QR code being advantageous. QR isn't limited to just black and white, it actually just nheeds to be two distinct colors, where one is much darker than the other.

A number of fast food joints in Japan print McDonalds-style burger wrappers - single color paper with different colored print. So, for example, at McD's my Big Mac wrapper was able to have a QR code on it at no extra cost to the printing process, other than having to add the tag to the layout.

If you took a picture with your mobile phone camera, it would direct you to the McDonalds website nutritional information page for the burger that you were eating.

I had the pleasure of hearing a speech from Epic at The Tokyo Games Show earlier this year (titled "Opportunities for Japanese Corporations in Middleware for Next-Generation Hardware"). While Sweeney did a good job of coming off as confident, but not overly so, in the Unreal engine itself. He was willing to offer the mostly Japanese audience a handful of reasons why their engine is and isn't the right way for companies to go, based on what sort of game you're trying to make. I could tell that the Japanese developers around me were on the same page as Sweeney, based on their gestures and the fact that they were actually taking notes about things that he said.

After that, Jay Wilbur decided to add a few words. Or rather, to be American. Now, don't get me wrong, I generally approve of being direct and selling your selling points, rather than mentioning that, yeah, our product isn't going to butter your toast every morning... BUT... when dealing with a Japanese audience, upfront honesty is the best way to go. Sweeney also had the "I'm roughly Japanese-sized" thing going for him. When rotund Wilbur stepped up to the plate, he set a bad tone by telling the rather humble but proud crowd of Japanese developers that "You need this engine". I heard one guy whisper to his friend, "Where does this guy think games started? Huh? *WE* __NEED__ them? Pfft." (in Japanese, so that's paraphrasing, of course)

What started as a good, solid discussion into the benefits of buying A game engine, ANY game engine, was quickly derailed into a product pitch for THEIR game engine. The thing is, Japanese companies, despite what modernizations have happened here, are still rather loyal when it comes to their big huge purchases. They'd rather go with someone they know, and I'm fairly certain that if Wilbur had just said nothing, or said much less than he did, and used much less arrogance and self-pimping in his speech, that the Japanese crowd would have gone home thinking, "You know, there's a company that's honest about their product, and that's willing to come all the way out here to persuade us that game engines are worth buying. We should seriously think about buying theirs". Instead, a lot of people left the room shaking their heads, muttering things about "Typical Americans. All talk. All about them. (etc)"

The thing about dealing with a foreign country is to go in and appreciate their background, their culture, and their style of work. To go in and trample all over their acheivements in an attempt to hock your wares just doesn't cut it.