examples:


Do we really need a Call of Duty and Guitar Hero every year. Madden is getting on my nerves and NBA live. Sometimes, its good they lose money, they need to rethink their games.

The wii is so successful because its so refreshing.

It's not as simple as "let's just make everything on Wii and it will be all sunshine and daisies" either.  World at War bombed on Wii.  Someday it may recover sales, but it will take a long time, and shooters will never sell as well on Wii as they do on the HD consoles and PC.  And here we have the problem: Western developers don't know how to make anything else anymore.  If it's not a shooter it's a bloody action game.  If it's not a bloody action game it's a bloody action RPG.  If it's not a bloody action RPG it bombs (Poor Prince of Persia). 

Publishers are screwed. The developers they employ can only make a certain style of game that happens to cost out the ass and not sell enough to make up for it.  How can they scrap their whole staff and start over?  What can they really do?  You talk about Japanese publishers having no influence, but you're completely wrong.  Japanese publishers are the ones who will still be around in a decade. What good does it do you to sell millions now if you are a dead company in 5 years?  Gaming is a business, and those who know how to stay in business are the ones that will matter in the future.

This actually feels a bit like the SNES/PSX days, where the most major Western games were on the PC rather than consoles, and consoles were primarily carried by Japanese titles.

Are Japanese Dev in such great shape either. And, for them if its not an RPG, its an instant fail over there.

Thanks for the heads up, memory2zack. Keep in mind this isn't an official statement, because F5 isn't a publicly held company.

Factor 5 lays off half its work force.

This isn't really what the problem is, Naz. Not quite.

Japanese developers in general acknowledge that the marketshare of Western-developed games has been rapidly dwarfing that of Japanese titles (assuming, of course, that one ignores Nintendo). Gamers want the unfairly characterized genre of Western games which migrated from the PC in the late 90's, and gamers want them to the exclusion of everything else. The problem is that demand for them will probably never grow past this point and it's very much a situation steeped in diminishing returns.

The Japanese problem, though, lies in the fact that they aren't prepared to be able to take back that mindshare, or at least they are not confident in their ability to do so. Nintendo's not worried about it, right now Nintendo isn't worried about anything, but for other Japanese developers they are seeing a completely unsustainable business model generate revenue far beyond anything they've ever produced, even if the profits don't match up.

When and if the Western developers bow out of the console business (and they will if they keep treating every console like a PC) it's going to create a power vacuum, yes. The question is whether the Japanese developers will be able to pick up the slack or if the whole thing will collapse in on itself and Nintendo is left as a single island to which developers will cling.

You're wrong.  You are thinking because it's not selling big numbers it's not profitable, but Japanese developers know how to make games that will recover costs, rather than might recover costs.  You think a game like Professor Layton or Phoenix Wright cost even 1/10 of Grand Theft Auto IV?  Of course not.  They probably cost less than 1/50.  So what's the more successful game?  The one that sold the most or the one that's making the company money?

1st §: correct western to american, because Europeans are creative enough with their games.

2nd $:  Very True. I don´t understand why there are people here who think japanese publishers are not influential anymore. 5 out of the top 10 publishers are japanese (Nintendo, Sony, Konami, Sega, Namco Bandai). And there´s SE, Capcom, and others that fill up the top 20. Then, in the top 10 publishers in profit most of them are japanese and many american publishers in the red, wether small, medium or big.

Yet, i do remember having the same thread about japanese Developers getting left behind. When it comes to the casual market which may be where the money is, but anything else, they are far behinfd this Gen.

http://www.asianweek.com/2008/12/06/what-is-wrong-with-japanese-game-development/

http://kotaku.com/337683/japanese-game-developers-in-trouble

They are behind, but not that much. And they are catching. It was more of a shock to Japan with its dwarfing market more than anything else. If no one has noticed, ever since the mid-end of the ps2 the japanese gaming market was in a big crisis. Only the DS managed to recover things up. Considering how things were and are they managed themselves very well.