famousringo said:
If Japan really is falling behind the rest of the world in videogames, it's because of game design, not technology. |
On the one hand, that's true. The mass market clearly doesn't really give a shit about whether or not a game has anti-aliasing or a system has a cobbled together, utterly archaic online system. I just realized that sounds kind of like a slap at Nintendo, but I don't mean it that way. 
It's just that it's entirely beside the point and has absolutely no bearing on success.
On the other, that doesn't really discount what Kojima is saying. Whenever someone says something along these lines, Nintendo fans always seem to say, "Yeah, but Nintendo!" Having to point to the outlier kind of makes Kojima's (or Inafune's, or whoever's) point for him. Nintendo's position is completely unique. I'm not saying that they aren't still doing do things that merit their continued success, or that their game design isn't more accessible and mass market friendly and doesn't have a more global appeal than, say, Konami's, but I also don't think the answer is to just "be more like Nintendo". Short of building a time machine, going back to the '80s, and beating Nintendo to the punch with a perfectly timed console and first party IPs that become a touchstone for gamers of a certain age, there's no sure fire way for any Japanese developer to guarantee success in today's market, and certainly not by game design alone. The mindshare Nintendo grabbed way back then - to the point that "Nintendo" became something of a catchall for a game console, sort of like how "Coke" is sometimes taken to just mean any soda - has been critical.
