Japan's Game Industry Ice Age

We Used to Be Number One. Why Did the Japanese Game Industry Crash and Burn? (2chan, Japanese Language)

The recent announcement of an IPO by online game giant Zynga has occasioned some serious soul-searching on Japan's notoriously frank 2chan bulletin board system. How did this relative newcomer to the gaming scene, whose products aren't even sold in stores, come to have a potential value of a billion dollars or more, while Japanese titans struggle to make their way in a rapidly changing industry?

Here's a selection of unvarnished opinions from the eternally pessimistic anonymous hordes, translated into English. 

The Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System) generation is in an ice age. Nobody has money or time for games. 

More accurately, everyone's outgrown games. Games are driven by kids. And Japan has fewer and fewer of those.

It's a total myth that Japanese shit ever dominated the world. All we have now is what we had then, which is beautiful little boys using swords and magic to fight sorcerers.

Ever since we abandoned PC games we've lost our technical skills, and now we're too far behind the curve to ever dig out.

It's because of the lack of any sort of educational path, and also because aside from a small portion of the industry, game company employees have no social standing.

We were never able to adapt to the shift to 3D and networked gaming is why.

Come on, now. The three top game companies in the world are Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Two out of three are Japanese. That ain't bad.

Yeah, but if this were the Nineties all three would be Japanese.

Dev costs are too high for small and medium sized players to compete anymore. 

It's the Wii's fault. Thanks to that system Japan's game developers were late getting on board with PS3. Unlike Level 5, a lot of makers couldn't easily make that transition.

SQEX is dead but maybe Sega and Konami and Nintendo still have life in them.

Sales figures haven't changed. What has changed is how good foreign developers have gotten.

The difference in technical abilities is just too obvious. Can any Japanese game company hope to compete with this? [Links to previews of "Uncharted 3" and "The Elder Scrolls V."] 

Will foreigners ever get tired of these super-realistically rendered games where all you do is race through shooting shit?

Hey, we're still number one in eroge (pornographic games!)

Comments

[Dave]

Matt, you should put the reply 842 which was the AKB48 PSP game! LOL

[The CronoLink]

It's because most Japanese devs are acting like, to put it in some way, hardcore. They have entrenched themselves and refuse to acknowledge that the problem lies with them; rather the fault is always with some other external factor, even so far as to blame customers (regardless if they are gaijin or not).
They try to please themselves first rather than the customers, making games they would like to play, which customers don't find worthy of their time and money. And on the occasions they try to do something about, rather than learn from past successes and blunders, specially those from the 80's and 90's, they just try to mediocrely "imitate the West" and then wonder why still people won't buy their games.

[Sofo]

Meh, many RPG games are completely filler, full of nothing but hack and slash battles and endless levelling anyways. The amount of time you spend trying to kill the bosses is endless, regardless of whether it's Japanese or Western. The story content? So much lesser. The good parts of the writing? Even less.

I'd rather play the Witcher series or Dragon Age 1 these days. I'd rather play something that's short to medium and worth my time than something lengthy which I'd forget in a few months' time 'cos it's too generic.

[MattAlt]

A big part of the problem, I think, is that the Japanese games that took the world by storm in the 8- and 16-bit eras were the same games (mostly) that took JAPAN by storm. Their success abroad was due to Japanese dev teams being the best at making the most of the limitations of the systems in a stylish way.

Today, however, tastes have simply diverged too much for any game co to be able to expect that something designed for the locals is going to necessarily fly abroad. And they are struggling to adapt in this changed marketplace. Some are doing better jobs than others at this. The more aggressive companies are exploring co-productions with foreign developers; those less so are are sinking into the safe but limited marketplace for pachinko game design (where there's a huge amount of money these days). It'll be interesting to see how things shake down.

[Just John]

I still like Squeenix.

Guess not everyone agrees with you Chrono.

Only problem I see is Japan needs to remember there is a wide world out there.

Many games I have wanted to try were available...only in Japan. It took them a long time for some of them to make the transition abroad (One took over 10 years).

Other sites (Thinking Hentai games here) block IP addresses outside of Japan (Not all, just saying that some have done so), and resist outsiders in trying to help translate it to bring it to those who wish to play it.

It seems to me that when it comes to Japanese games, in the past, we chose them because of the quality, but we were left with whatever they "wanted to feed us", and not much choice.

Now, they still try to select only what they wish to try to push to us, but other developers worldwide have realized that people like games, and have jumped in, leaving Japanese companies still making "for Japan" and maybe, maybe later deciding to take it to the worldwide audience, if they felt like it (Impressions, not stating facts here).

The mindset needs to change away from the "Lets just send them a few of our games and they will be happy" to actively producing games for the world, instead of giving us their leftovers.

That is my 2 cents.