| RolStoppable said: Japanese companies won't regain their significance by playing by the rules of the Western companies and trying to make games like them. It's a lose-lose situation: The gamers who are mostly interested in Western games would still buy those over Japanese games who try to be like Western games while the gamers who like the traditional Japanese games are put off by the changes. Like usual, this article leaves Nintendo out of the picture. Does Nintendo try to westernize their games? No. Do Nintendo games aim for a realistic graphics style? No. Nintendo hasn't changed much over all these years and their games are still selling millions. The other Japanese companies had no problems to sell their games last generation, so what has changed since then? Besides the ill conceived belief that they have to westernize their games, they are making their games for the wrong consoles. The Wii is the market leader, development costs are reasonable and the horsepower is sufficient. Japanese games usually don't aim for realistic looking graphics anyway. On top of that the competition from Western companies is hardly there on the Wii, Nintendo's system plays more to the strengths of Japanese game development than the HD consoles do. Bottom line: I disagree with the article and say that Japanese companies should look at what Nintendo does to be successful instead of trying to directly compete against the full force of Western companies. |
Thi sums up pretty well what I always thought and always said this gen.
It's pretty obvious too.
Just think that the Wii has two poor quality JRPG spinoffs that sold far well than most high production JRPG on other consoles, and the conclusion is obvious. The XB360 userbase proved that it wouldn't support JRPG, they pretty much all flopped hard on it. The PS3 too, even though it had one of the most innovative JRPG of this gen (Senjou No Valkyria).
Except the handhelds, the only console that can support JRPG, and most japanese games this gen, is the Wii.
I'd rather ask what made japanese devs, and to a less extent western devs, do stupid mistakes like they did.
They did things that make no sense as to their games positioning, and some continue to do so (Square part of Square Enix, only the Enix part get it). At least I know western devs stupidly followed stupid agencies like EEDAR (sp?) with their flawed analysis. But the japanese? They have no excuses.
I said they would be doomed trying to go after the western market. Seems like it was true: every single one of their western oriented games just flop. They have to play with western rules, and they just fail at that, for obvious reasons.
To me, all these articles are just illustrations of their failures.
This article is a bit more, as it is so stupid, and so obviously filled with an agenda, that I'm pretty sure it's a PR in disguise.
