Well, that depends. You could also argue that having several hundred people working on one game is a bit wasteful as well. If you have so many people working on one game that it has to sell 5 million copies just to break even (not even counting advertising), you're rolling the dice with every release.

Because they dont want you to download a day one patch lol

Japanese devs. love to properly craft their product and dare to go beyond what we conceive as a video game or improve a genre drastically. Ico, Shadows, and now The Last Guardian are great examples. For my point in genre, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Streets of Rage, Street Fighter, TMNT: Turtles in Time, Snatcher Silent Hill, Chrono Trigger, Vanquish, Bayonett, Xenogears, No More Heroes, , Mario and Sonic, Gran Turismo, Legend of Zelda, and countless others have helped their genres in one way or another.


This isn't to say western devs. are slouches. Mortal Kombat, Sly Cooper, StarCraft, Halo: Combat Evolved, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, doom, Fallout, Mass Effect, Folklore, God of War, Half Life, Portal, EverQuest, Dota, Forza, Gears of War, Killzone, Counter Strike, Diablo and others are also influential. My issues stems from time frames by the publishers via cutting corners to meet deadlines. Activision and EA are the pinnacle of said practice. This isn't to say Japanese publishers are innocent either. Capcom, SEGA, Konami, and now to a lesser extent in Square Enix all have done similar practices or just destroy franchises all together.


For me, Japanese devs. just seem to have more pride and thought when creating a game. Even going back to gamings early days, Japanese devs. knew what it took to appease people. Companies now like Platinum, Xseed, Sura 51, Atlus, NIS America and others now feel the pressure of creating games even more so than western devs. do. For a western dev even like GearBox can take a hit from a game like Duke Nuken Forever. A Japanese dev. cannot as funds are limited due to the market they need their products to succeed.


At the end of the day, Japanese devs. need to exceed expectations even more unless they have established IP in the west to make a comfortable living. Therefore, the old term of "Quality over Quantity" is really amplified here.

Indeed. The Japanese market isn't doing Japanese devs. much; smaller devs. an even steeper hill to climb. For example, Thatgamecompany could make a bigger impact in its region than say, Idea Factory. Budgets aren't given out in spades. That being said, resourcefulness and intuition are key; creativity and polish to boot.

If memory serves, they halted development on KH3 and went to a different game engine. It was running on the Luminous Engine. But after a shakeup at SE they changed directors and they went to the Unreal Engine. So they pretty much started over on KH3.

The shooters are annualized because they got 3 development teams on them to make them every year.

If only there was a Japanese developer here to shed some light on it.

I think there might be a trend changing. Look how capcom plans to outsource in order to decrease their development cycles.http://gamerant.com/capcom-development-cycle-poole-30876/

Actually last year Activision added an extra team, so they have 3 developers on CoD and each one has 3 years to release the game now.

Japanese developers usually have less staff. It's not hard to pump CoD once a year when they have around 600 to 1000 people working on the games full time.

I'm not sure if a simple increase in team size is a good thing. I remember when Capcom was bragging that 600 people were involved in the creation of Resident Evil 6. Boy did it show. With that game, it seemed like nobody was in charge and nobody quite knew what they were doing.

Anyway, there are a few reasons why Japanese games take longer to make, both good in bad. If we're talking about a game from someone like Shigeru Miyamoto or Shinji Mikami, those people have reputations. The people who publish their games believe in them and are willing to allow them to take as long as it's necessary to make the right game. In fact, speaking of Miyamoto and Mikami, these are two men who will throw away 18 months of work and start over if something isn't going right. How often does any western developer do such a thing? On the bad side, the Japanese are just now starting to catch up to the west when it comes to game development. The west had been using licensed engines for their games for a long time and doing this cuts back on development time by a lot. Throughout the 2000's, many Japanese developers have insisted on developing their own engine for each game from scratch which takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. 

That article was from several years ago. This plan had a lot of bad results. Capcom as of last year has abandoned plans to outsource anymore of their games and plans on hiring more internal developers.