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Japanese Game Developers Go West
donniebaseball23 writes "More and more Japanese game studios and publishers are looking toward the West. But as the industry becomes more global, is this really such a bad thing? From the article: 'Gameplay is an art that transcends borders, and it simply makes good business sense to keep your eyes open for opportunities no matter where they present themselves, as Zenimax, EA and THQ clearly have. Far from ruining the Japanese gaming industry, it may in fact save some of the best Japanese developers from considering retirement or a career change. They'll be able to make games on their own terms with their own original IP, and shouldn't it ultimately be about these creative types being able to realize their visions?""
This is a good thing, just so long as we don't have to play another "war of the three kingdoms" game, I'm utterly sick of those.
Japanese franchises barely evolved. Final Fantasy ran into that trap.
Why do articles about the video game business have to refer to law by saying "original IP" when they can call it an "original setting" and be understood by more readers?
Technically the physical relocation involved is via a plane flying east over the Pacific. I mean, westward is really the rest of Eurasia here.
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mmmmm.... "these creative types"
Hacking code for a living is an art and is a creative endeavor... but calling me a type... sheesh.
I find it funny that I, as an American game developer, want to go work in Japan.
I wonder if I can trade apartments and jobs with one of them or something?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
China?
It makes me wonder if it's worth learning me Japanese these days. I've been at it for about a year, alongside doing a lot of video game related development work as part of a team of friends doing some indie development. In an ideal, wonderful fantasy world I see myself becoming fluent in Japanese and taking my game-related aspirations further with it, but I'm beginning to question that these days.
Is that something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NZ04BG7TfA
- Joe
From the article: "One, the percentage of the worldwide market composed of Japanese titles has shrunk, and if you exclude Nintendo, would be shown to have drastically shrunk worldwide." Okay, where is he getting this supposed information, or did he should pull it out of thin air? He didn't even cite any numbers either. So that's bunk.
"...major Japanese game publishers have become much more conservative and sequel driven". Uh... and this is a recent trend? Square has been milking Final Fantasy like a cow since the 1990s. Westerners didn't know because they skipped on releasing a whole bunch of games in the series. Same deal with Capcom and Rockman on the NES, except we actually received Mega Man game after Mega Man game outside of Japan. Heck, Konami released a good number of Akumajo Dracula/Castlevania games, some of which were just different versions of the first game.
As for the globalization that the whole article is about. Um... we've had that for years. Sega was founded by an American guy for goodness sake. Namco worked with Bally/Midway to release Pac-Man games (which was supposedly a tumultuous relationship). Japanese companies have founded American divisions who've screwed up countless localization jobs. Action games like some of the ones in the Mario and Sonic series have been developed with Western audiences in mind, because, well, you can make lots of money catering to the West.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Eh, not too many people seem to mind. And any gamer lost due to the "gayness" is replaced by a female gamer who's more than happy about it. Not to mention, we have games like Gears of War which is gay by Western standards, but practically flaming by Japanese standards (the character design lean towards the stereotypical image of a homosexual in Japanese media).
Like into China? Or West as in the Western world? The title, at least, is a bit confusing, and we certainly can't expect everyone to read the article. :p
I think it's great that Japanese game developers are working with Western publishers (western as in American). Anything to provide cross-pollination of ideas and styles is always a good thing. I'm not a big fan of the art style or the grinding that seems to be in vogue for a lot of the Japanese games, but there's plenty there to love, as well.
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To be honest I hate it when these Japanese company purposely tweak their game to try and make it more "Western friendly." I enjoy Japanese games, I like Nintendo, I like Squaresoft, and I like Western games for what they are.
Studios need to focus on what they are good at. A lot of American gamers like Japanese games, I'd much prefer if Western games and Japanese games stayed good at their own thing instead of trying to copy each other.
What's better, one great Japanese game, and one great Western game. Or a single sub-standard Japanese/Western game?
So Japanese games will now have revolutionary western game ideas like hit points, potions, oozes/slimes, experience points, levels and the idea of using a single unit on foot instead of an army to complete a series of quests? Oh wait. Japan has been using that forever. Now if your talking about setting like the article seems to imply...no wait, most Japanese games don't actually take place in Japan (if you ignore the indie dating sim developers, since most of their games never get official ports). From Final Fantasy to Zelda, most Japanese games have always been very "western" in almost every way...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Not to mention, we have games like Gears of War which is gay by Western standards, but practically flaming by Japanese standards (the character design lean towards the stereotypical image of a homosexual in Japanese media).
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
So THIS looks "gay" by their standards:
http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/Marcus-Fenix-Fig.jpg
Yet THIS is supposed to be some badass villain?
http://dissidia.rhapsodos.org/images/art/portraits/kuja.png
I'm sorry, that ain't something that is just tossed up to cultural differences. The gayness and non-gayness of these characters is something that should transcend cultures.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Eh, anyone's a badass if they have enough ill defined magical abilities. It's not like the sorceress from FF8, the pretty boy from FF7, and the clown from FF6 was all that impressive in stature either.
But, to get back on topic, there's certainly gay erotica with effeminate men. However these tend to be created by women, and marketed for women who enjoy such things. Media created by gay men is know as "bara", and goes for muscular men. Because of this, both examples you shown can be considered gay if done in excess. And of course, Gears of War is a damn sausage fest.
More and more Japanese game studios and publishers are looking toward the West. But as the industry becomes more global, is this really such a bad thing?
Are we supposed to assume that's a bad thing? What's the connection between the first sentence here and the second? I'm so confused...
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Is slashdot broken? There's supposedly 49 replies, why can't I see any of them?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Especially since Perfect Storm was an awful film.
I love using actually. Actually, I think that's the greatest word in the English language; Though I agree with perfect storm. Perfect storm is to Intelligent Design as Destiny is to Creationism.
Bye!
Having a Japanese developer making a Western game actually is a stupid thing...
Citation needed. You obviously didn't play console games in the 70's, 80's, 90's, etc.
The Japanese have done fine without using western developers for decades and in fact most of the bigger successes still come from Japan. Nintendo alone proves that.
The only area where Japan may be weak is catering to the Xbox crowd which is also the ex-PC crowded and insecure teenager crowd. I don't want to see Japan knocking boring shit like Halo year after year. If they feel they're not doing as well it will because they're getting less imaginative and lowering standards just like western developers.
While I understand the history, I've always found the terms "East", "West", "Middle East" and similar non-geographic geographic/cultural nomenclature to be arrogant at best. West of Japan is China, and they may end up being the new west if the arrogant USA doesn't get it's intellectual act together.
The world is not some flat map that some idiot in the 1800s drew on paper. I agree that using the pacific was probably a pretty good idea for a separator there on paper, but the general terms of "East" and "West" as used by most talking heads is just shallow-thinking.
Sort of like the words/terms "perfect storm", "actually", and "blog" really annoy me.
Now get off my lawn.
If you are using the English language then the terms East West etc. are valid. These terms have their origins in Graeco-Roman culture, i.e. the occident and the orient which identify regions that had cultural similarites and connections. Of course with such generalisations there will inevitably be some blurred lines and inaccuracies. With the advent of colonialisation and globalisation the geographic/directional connotations of West and East have lost some of their importance.
In Japanese you may use whatever terms you like, as you might know all foreigners could be referred to as gaikokujin or the more impolite gaijin, but the economic and cultural power of the "Western" nations in the 19th and 20th centuries has led to the term Western becoming adopted in some senses. In fact
historically, the Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit Japan, were known as nanbanjin (literally "southern barbarians").
from wikipedia.
Before you make any silly western colonial superiority statements against me, I am from a nation that suffered from colonialsm, so I am not biased in that regard.
Because "original IP" is technically correct
VortexCortex made a good point that "intellectual property" conflates the distinct purposes and scopes of copyrights and patents. To that, I wanted to add another defect of the term:
"Original intellectual property" overemphasizes the fact that it is property, or something to which exclusive rights are attached, not commons, or something for all to use in moderation. Furthermore, the abbreviation of "intellectual property" as "IP" carries an implication that people should already know that the best way to treat a setting is as property, not as commons. Conflating a setting with the exclusive rights attached to that setting causes problems for cases where the exclusive rights aren't in the normal pattern of exclusive control by an established company. For example, if someone were to make a film or video game adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, which has entered the public domain due to age, would this be an "original IP" because no license was involved, "3rd party IP" because it was created by someone else, or not an IP at all because it is commons?
if "original setting" were to be used, then to obtain the same scope of statement, one would also have to include a great deal of other concepts, such as, characters, monsters, plot devices, powers and items.
All these elements exist within a setting, and due to treating settings and elements within them as property, your "characters, monsters, plot devices, powers and items" won't appear outside the setting. I will grant however that there are a few exceptions, but these are rare enough to be billed as the top bullet point in a work's pitch. These include crossovers like Kingdom Hearts, mascot fighters like Super Smash Bros., and public-domain settings like those that were fused into the Shrek setting.
I don't get it, aren't video games in Japan a lot more open-minded? It's always in the U.S. that we're stuck with the same type of titles, most of the interesting, oddball, creative games come from Japan (Okami, Katamari, etc.)
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It's also common in Japan to say "the west" (seiyou (characters won't render on slashdot--why?)), to refer to what we also mean by 'the west,' meaning specifically europe instead of asia, but also referring to the U.S., and culturally, yes, it's fairly ambiguous. For example, in Murakami Haruki's 'All God's Children Can Dance', in the first vignette Omura is brought to a love hotel that looked like a "seiyou no shiro" (a western castle).
The Japanese word for west itself, nishi is commonly used for referring to Spain, as in nissei (a conjunction of nichi (nippon) and sei/nishi (west) meaning Japan-Spain (eg. Japan-Spain relations).
Of course, in spherical polar coordinates, north and south have non-circular definitions, but east/west is 2Pi-periodic. On the other hand, we do get a sort of branch cut with the International Date Line, so that to Japan, all the rest of the world is to the west. I'm guessing Japan is okay with this idea since it fits in with 'the Land of the Rising Sun', which it's too bad has nothing to do with Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."
On the topic of the article, I don't think this means the actual demise of game development in Japan, just the expansion beyond its own borders, which I think will be interesting to see how it turns out.
In time you'll see that phrase disappear, hopefully along with the overuse of the term "content".
RMS agrees with you about "content" and "intellectual property".
Along with "SKU", these always make me grind my teeth.
Perhaps I'm biased because I work for an e-tailer, but what's wrong with "stock keeping unit" to refer to a particular, distinctly sold variant of a product?
Essentially it goes like this:
Someone who is "overly masculine" to the point of bodybuilding, etc., is obviously obsessed with masculinity. They are obsessed with masculinity because they don't value femininity at all -- because they're gay. ESPECIALLY if they are constantly around men who have a similar physique. In Japan nothing is gayer than a bodybuilder's gym.
If you really want to get the girls, you have a boyish charm, and focus on a softer form of male beauty.
Also, if you like to wear pink frilly dresses it's under the assumption that you're a perv, not gay. (Think of Ed Wood and why he crossdressed. He did it because he WAS into women, and styling himself as one made him feel closer to them.)
That said, there is also an effeminate gay stereotype in Japan, but they are treated almost as women rather than gay men. ...but what's gayer -- an obsession with dresses or an obsession with ripped beefy muscles and oiled glistening skin?
(See other reply to this post for an explanation of "Bara")
I'm replying to AC, so I know it's very likely a waste of time, but in case anybody comes across this comment, I must say that jokes aside, China does have a pretty vibrant game dev scene.
Unfortunately it is extreme bias - lingual mostly - that means no one in the "West" sees Chinese games. Just go to any Popular Bookstore in Singapore, head to the games section, and you'll see a dozen or so Mandarin language games that include a 3 Kingdoms clone, an MMO called Granado Espada that is exclusively Far East Asian in distribution, and a ton of Chinese RPGs.
The bias is a real shame because there is this absolutely awesome 3 Kingdoms collectible card game which was specifically designed with an arcade machine laid out like a tabletop board game. You place your cards on it according to the rules, the table somehow recognises the cards and your cards' units appear on a screen in real-time. Moving your armies consists of physically moving the card around the tabletop, pro rated for that unit's speed. Special moves are done with card gestures like describing a tight circle or repeatedly "bashing" the location of an enemy unit where you believe it appears on the tabletop. It's genius! I think Magic: The Gathering would be absolutely amazing if it had this variation.
Either that or the hymn written by Henry Smith in 1978 that they both allegedly copied: Give Thanks.
Interestingly enough, this makes WAY more sense than our Western concept of what is gay or not.