Japan Used to be the Top Game Developers. What happened?

[Fly Guy]

What is Your opinion?

Here is an interesting article:

"Japan used to rule video games, so what happened?"[www.theverge.com]

""I think most Japanese publishers and developers have realized that, instead of trying to mimic what's popular outside Japan, they should make what they understand culturally and what they can do best," says Yoshida. This is sensible, of course, and can even lead to unpredictable Western successes like From Software’s unforgiving action RPGs Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. But it’s a vicious circle — Western games grow more and more removed from Japanese consumer tastes, so Japanese companies serve their home market by stopping any attempt to appeal to the rest of the world, and Japan’s global influence continues to decline."

[Raiden]

Aren't They Still On The Top?

[♠ZerØ♠]

That is a really good questions. One I am sure a lot of us would like an answer for.

Between SquareEnix's constant pushes into gaming hubris, with only their aquired licenses coming out welll received; Konami's CEO seeming on a mad power, and Nintendo's refusal to step away from the gimmiky side of gaming while only releasing the same 5 games over and over again...

It seems like Japans core software development companies have hit some kind of creative slump.

[Fly Guy]

ROTFLMAO, I always had thought that PAC-MAN was an American game until today. Well, Midway games/NetherRealm Studios is an American video game developer and publisher but PAC-MAN was designed by a Japanese, Toru Iwatani.

[Raiden]

genghis KHAN の投稿を引用：

ROTFLMAO, I always had thought that PAC-MAN was an American game until today. Well, Midway games/NetherRealm Studios is an American video game developer and publisher but PAC-MAN was designed by a Japanese, Toru Iwatani.

But Pac-Man was published by Namco.

[Fly Guy]

Naked Raiden の投稿を引用：

genghis KHAN の投稿を引用：

ROTFLMAO, I always had thought that PAC-MAN was an American game until today. Well, Midway games/NetherRealm Studios is an American video game developer and publisher but PAC-MAN was designed by a Japanese, Toru Iwatani.

But Pac-Man was published by Namco.

In the U.S., it was published by Midway Games.

[Chetty Spaghetti]

I think they still are the strongest country gaming-wise. They just aren't as strong as they used to be.

[Fly Guy]

Tendoza の投稿を引用：

I think they still are the strongest country gaming-wise. They just aren't as strong as they used to be.

I don't see how you have concluded to this Most if not all the recent AAA title games that I can think of are non-Japanse. I'll name some randonly on the top of my head:

*The Last of Us
*Elder Scroll games
*Tomb Raider 2013
*Shadow of Mordor
*Grand Theft Auto games
*The Witcher
*Batman
*Dark Souls
*Mortal Kombat
*Borderlands...and the list goes on and on.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

One interesting thing about all this is that you now have western gamers in their 20s and 30s making indie games of and/or inspired by the same styles as the Japanese games they played as children and teens.

the article の投稿を引用：

One reason is the relative lack of adoption of digital downloads and other online services in Japan.

This goes to a more general point that I've heard about the Japanese gaming consumer base (as well as the anime/manga consumer base, incidentally) -- that you basically have a very dedicated core userbase, but very little room to grow outside of that. Assuming that's the case, it's pretty remarkable that Nintendo (of all companies) basically blasted open the casual market (in the west, no less) with the Wii.

This also leads to a strong aversion of making things more available by reducing price points. If your customer base can't expand (few people with lower but nonzero willingness to pay) and all you have is a dedicated fanbase (people with high willingness to pay), then it's economically more feasible to wring as much money out of the dedicated fanbase as possible.

However, gaming is definitely rapidly approaching mainstream status in the weest, and with it comes a lot of people who ARE those "discount" consumers who don't have the dedication to throw down hundreds or thousands of dollars for systems (either gaming PCs or keeping up with the console generations) and games, but who are willing to step into something if it invites them, for a small fee.

Does this have a bad effect on devs and publishers? Possibly. People have also talked about the "devaluation" of games via Steam sales and the everpresent bundles these days. But regardless, it's clearly become a part of the industry that there are a lot of consumers (at least in the west) who are receptive to lower price points.

And fewer constraints on gaming, in general, actually. For a very similar reason, I've heard that DRM-free isn't particularly popular among Japanese publishers. Nihon Falcom is the prominent exception in all of this, being willing to offer its English-localized products (Ys games, Trails games, soundtracks on Amazon) DRM-free on the western market. But if you think back to that willingness-to-pay picture, you're gonna have to find enough new customers to make up for the revenues you lose from piracy or other lost revenue on the hardcore consumers. (Similarly I've heard that the reason K-pop's suddenly exploded is because K-pop publishers are more okay with their stuff showing up all over Youtube.)

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

the article の投稿を引用：

Tastes changed, too. Mark MacDonald, executive director at Tokyo localization company 8-4, says the industry’s prevailing shift in tone from fantasy worlds to gritty warfare has seen the rest of the world leave Japan behind. "First-person shooters rely on realism, but a lot of Japanese game design comes from a imaginative aesthetic where it’s not just going for straight realism. But that [realism] was kind of what people started to want."

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally, I still like that sort of whimsical imaginative aesthetic, rather than gritty realism, and I've never really enjoyed the gritty realism aesthetic that much.

The gritty realism thing becoming big may have been due to technology, incidentally. Back in the day, everything HAD to be stylized since graphics were incapable of delivering verisimilitude. Then computing power went up, the FPS was born, and then everyone became obsessed with "realism" and graphical detail.

(there's more but for some reason I am having trouble posting this)

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Speaking of realism and graphical detail, that's actually an increasingly unsustainable business practice, even in the west. Sure, the article is commenting on the Japanese game industry, but it's certainly not like everything's peachy here in the west either. You have publishers spending increasingly insane sums of money on games just for their graphical fidelity, and they require increasingly insane sales numbers to justify their expenses.

But games really aren't necessarily about realism, they're about simulating something that's unreal that we want to be or want to do. In that "less is more" sense, judicious use of style and a more limited graphical budget may be part of why indie games are on the rise. After all, those constraints were what spawned the creativity of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras anyway.

Kuroi Taiyo の投稿を引用：

Between SquareEnix's constant pushes into gaming hubris, with only their aquired licenses coming out welll received; Konami's CEO seeming on a mad power, and Nintendo's refusal to step away from the gimmiky side of gaming while only releasing the same 5 games over and over again...

To be fair to Nintendo, though, they tend to make really darn good games. Granted, if not for that, they wouldn't be able to survive.

genghis KHAN の投稿を引用：

Tendoza の投稿を引用：

I think they still are the strongest country gaming-wise. They just aren't as strong as they used to be.

I don't see how you have concluded to this. This is just an estimation but all the recent AAA title games that I can think of are non-Japanse. I'll name some randonly on the top of my head:

*The Last of Us
*Elder Scroll games
*Tomb Raider 2013
*Shadow of Mordor
*Grand Theft Auto games
*The Witcher
*Batman
*Dark Souls
*Mortal Kombat
*Borderlands...and the list goes on and on.

FYI Dark Souls is Japanese. Also, Splatoon just got released. And Skyrim was a little while ago. And there's Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, Smash, Monster Hunter, Final Fantasy, and many other big names you're missing. And so on.

But yeah, the list you produced was basically a western PC-centric view of things, which is probably true for a place like Steam but not necessarily representative of the whole industry. It is true that those are relatively well-known games and series even to gamers outside of their fanbases though (with the exception of Shadow of Mordor which I don't recognize).

Edit: sorry about the split posts, but for some reason Steam kept on preventing me from posting it together. I've heard the forum prevents certain types of code from being posted, but none of this contains any code...

[Chetty Spaghetti]

genghis KHAN の投稿を引用：

*The Last of Us
*Elder Scroll games
*Tomb Raider 2013
*Shadow of Mordor
*Grand Theft Auto games
*The Witcher
*Batman
*Dark Souls
*Mortal Kombat
*Borderlands...and the list goes on and on.

Well Dark Souls is definitely Japanese, but I do get your point. Personally I don't care for a lot of the games you listed, but I understand that a lot do.

But I think an aspect of your list/understanding proves something interesting. You lumped in a number of countries together (Poland, UK, USA) as simply non-Japanese rather than products of their own countries. I think if you take every country in the world and pit them against Japan, then yeah, you'd probably wind up with better games (which wasn't always the case). A single country on their own though? I still think Japan's on top.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Japan has never been dominant on PC, either, and that's a list of PC games, at a time (now) when even Japanese devs that have been historically friendly to the PC (I'm thinking of Falcom) have left it due to unprofitability.

(Hopefully that changes though.)

[PyroPanda]

They sure like to screw over the West i know that.. Like there is a better chance I will see half life 3, before i see PSO2 in the West LOL. But of course not all Japanese countries are like this.

[Fly Guy]

Tendoza の投稿を引用：

Well Dark Souls is definitely Japanese, but I do get your point. Personally I don't care for a lot of the games you listed, but I understand that a lot do.

But I think an aspect of your list/understanding proves something interesting. You lumped in a number of countries together (Poland, UK, USA) as simply non-Japanese rather than products of their own countries. I think if you take every country in the world and pit them against Japan, then yeah, you'd probably wind up with better games (which wasn't always the case). A single country on their own though? I still think Japan's on top.

The list of games are random and it has nothing to do with the world vs Japan or my understanding. It is a randomly generated list of non-Japanese games. The point is Japan used to easily have the top 10-20 games most play/purchased games on the market. That is no longer the case any more. Japan hasn't had a strong influence outside its own country for a very long time.

Tendoza の投稿を引用：

I still think Japan's on top.

I'll give you a challenge. Find me an article that says why Japan still rules the video game industry.

I can find numerous articles why Japan doesn't (anymore).

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Tendoza の投稿を引用：

A single country on their own though? I still think Japan's on top.

Actually, USA is probably on top in that case, simply due to sheer volume.

genghis KHAN の投稿を引用：

The list of games are random and it has nothing to do with the world vs Japan or my understanding. It is a randomly generated list. The point is Japan used to easily have the top 10-20 games most play/purchased games on the market. That is no longer the case any more. Japan hasn't had a strong influence outside its own country for a very long time.

Probably random-seeming to you, but it's a PC-centric list you came up with.

Japan hasn't been dominant on PC, but Japan has never been dominant on PC.

On the other hand, you can't really pretend that heavyweight series like Smash and Pokémon don't exist. They're just not on PC.