What’s Wrong With Japanese Game Development?
December 6, 2008
Malaise strikes Japan as gaming market shifts towards the West
Since Nintendo conquered American living rooms with the NES, studios from Japan have largely dominated game development. So it is a bit of a shock that they have fared somewhat poorly in recent years, declining steadily even as the industry enjoys unprecedented growth.
Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Shimbun last week dubbed the decline “The Melancholy of Cool Japan”; meanwhile gamers worldwide have shifted their attentions elsewhere, making Western giants EA and Activision-Blizzard the kings of the video game heap.
How did Japanese game developers lose the hearts and minds of a consumer base renowned for its loyalty? The most damaging reason has been Japan’s inability to evolve alongside the rest of the gaming industry.
The success of the preposterously popular Nintendo Wii is spurred on by mostly casual consumers, whose tendency to buy few games has damaged the financial prospects of third-party developers on that system. Meanwhile, the American hardcore — who buy games at a rate that pleases publishers — have largely flocked towards the Microsoft’s Xbox 360, a platform that receives relatively little support from Japanese developers.
Microsoft’s success can be attributed to third-party support and its streamlined online service, Xbox Live. Perhaps because of Japanese gamers’ overall disinterest with online multiplayer games, Sony and Nintendo consoles have been slow to keep up with Live, and the sometimes-clunky interface found in the PS3 and Wii platforms have damaged their chances to attract the American hardcore.
The success of the American-made console has also resulted in the primacy of genres more suited to Western audiences, particularly first- and third-person shooters, categories unpopular amongst Japanese developers. Japanese titles in the Role Playing Game genre, which enjoyed immense popularity on previous console generations, have been largely ignored by American consumers, who eschew the long-haired, emotionally fragile protagonists of those games for the musclebound, bald space marines omnipresent in shooters.
The company most crucial to the JRPG’s popularity, Square-Enix, has spent the past few years capitalizing on the nostalgia of aging gamers by remaking classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV for handheld platforms; meanwhile, its current-gen RPG offerings (Infinite Undiscovery, The Last Remnant) received an unenthusiastic reception from Western consumers. Perhaps most shockingly, the most notable RPGs of this generation — Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3 — have come not from Japan, but from Western studios, an astonishing development in a genre dominated by the East only a few years ago.
The doom and gloom does not extend over all Japanese studios, however. Capcom’s Western-influenced Resident Evil 5, for instance, is sure to sell well on these shores, and Konami scored a major hit with Metal Gear Solid 4, which was designed with Western audiences in mind. Innovative titles from visionaries like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and Grasshopper’s Suda 51 (who was profiled in this column last week) mean that American gamers ignore Japan at their own risk.
But the Japanese gaming industry is declining, and unless more companies from that country make effective efforts to keep up with Western audiences, that trend looks unlikely to change.
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Good article. However, I think that as the leading platform this gen, the Japanese should focus more on the Wii.
This idea that only casual games sell is a fallacy as there are plenty of Wii owners looking for more substantial games, they’re just not catered for as nobody, east or west takes the machine seriously.
As an owner of multiple systems, I’ve been seriously disappointed at the lack of cool new action titles for the Wii during 2008. I’ve got a big list of great new Xbox 360 titles, both online and in store, but my Wii just sits there and gathers dust as I pass over titles like “Animal Crossing,” cooking games and the lame retreads available on Nintendo’s online service. I have to cross my fingers that 2009 will be better for Wii gamers.