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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?""
Japanese franchises barely evolved. Final Fantasy ran into that trap.
China?
I gather you are a dynamic languages guy.
But... the future refused to change.
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.
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?
Original Ideas... done.
IP (Intellectual Property AKA Imaginary Property) is a made up term that muddles your meanings.
Copyright & Patent laws both exist, are very different despite both being made of ideas. Lumping them together is stupid. Copyrights covers a single verbatim work and allows for "fair use", patents cover any derivative work and have no fair use. Copyrights lasts for 70 years beyond the creators lifetime, patents are limited to around 18 years from granting. Copyrights are granted automatically upon creation of an original work (in the US), patents must be applied for and creating an "original" work does not guarantee a patent will be granted.
Stop using IP. It's a confused and confusing term.
My friend worked as a translator for one of the big Gaming companies for a good while. He left because of the endless long hours, I asked him about the devs. "Oh, them? I've never seen any of them entering or leaving their office".
Sweet, the devs never have to show up for work at all? That rocks, Sign me up!
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.
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.)
All glory to Arstotzka!
Yeah why have any variety at all when we can just have Halo and GoW clones.
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.
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")