Like it or hate it, Japan has been a portable-driven market over the last few years. HD consoles have been relatively ignored by the masses, while the DS and PSP have gobbled up the lion’s share of hardware and software sales. There has already been a lot of discussion among both Eastern and Western gaming communities about why this is the case, but surprisingly little conversation has occurred on both sides of the Pacific regarding the long-term consequences of this drastic shift in the Japanese gaming marketplace. The new realities of HD game development, the expanding global marketplace, and naivete based on local market successes may spell trouble for Japanese companies – entities that are notoriously slow to adapt to drastic change.
In Japan, there is a word for this phenomenon: Galapagosification. This term refers to the Galapagos Islands, where birds and animals have evolved so specifically in isolation to match their environment that they are incapable of surviving anywhere else. The term is often used to describe the cellphone marketplace in Japan, but it can be applied to gaming as well. Replace “their environment” with “Japan,” “birds and animals” with “game development strategy,” and “anywhere else” with “in the international gaming community,” and the picture becomes quite clear. The phenomenon was recently discussed on the latest edition of Japanese gaming podcast Warning: A Huge Podcast, in which it was revealed that some Japanese game makers are equally unsettled by the current state of game production in the country.
A designer from Alchemist, a maker of virtual novel games in Japan, recently commented on the current trends in Japanese game development and stated that it will become increasingly difficult for Japanese game makers to succeed globally if they are focused on a section of the market that isn’t as popular overseas (i.e. portables with at-most PS2-level development specs). The designer said that studios are investing resources in PS2-level game development (for PSP) and will be woefully unprepared for both HD game development and next-gen portable development.
When Japanese companies do create high definition titles, development times are painfully long. Square Enix has been a poster-child of vaporware this generation, with Final Fantasy XIII taking over five years to develop and Final Fantasy Versus XIII (which was announced at the same time as Final Fantasy XIII) still without a release date. Other Japanese games from other developers, such as Gran Turismo 5, also had notoriously long development periods.
The problem with Japanese game development is both complex and multi-faceted. Most of the issues the industry is currently facing in Japan are related to business culture, ignorance, and Galapagosification, but it goes even further than that. Here are some notable examples:
- Over Refined: Fewer console games are released as each one takes more time to develop. While development is going on, the concept is refined and over-scrutinized. Final Fantasy XIII lost its soul during the long development process, leaving great graphics and battle system with linear environments and certain characters that don’t appeal to a worldwide audience. As the fully Japanese marketing team refines the concept for the local market over and over again, international interests are becoming more and more alienated (by Galapagosification). The game felt more like an answer to a Japanese marketing formula than an epic tale. This isn’t to say that Western game companies aren’t guilty of designing to a marketing template, which eliminates a potential Japanese audience in the process.
- Let’s Reinvent The Wheel, Again: Traditional Japanese game development practices call for recreating much of the game engine logic for each game release. In the HD console era, this cannot be done quickly or efficiently. I have to pick on Square Enix again here, as company head Yoichi Wada has tried several initiatives for applying existing middleware to game projects (using the foreign-based teams at Eidos). He has stated, however, that internal development teams in Japan are still reluctant to use existing tools and prefer to write their own. A lot of time and effort was invested into the Crystal Tools engine, and hopefully that effort will pay off in reduced development times for upcoming Square Enix titles.
- Potent Portables: With migration to handhelds by the Japanese market (thanks to the DS and Monster Hunter), game development companies followed. Most games in Japan being released right now are designed with PSP in mind. Sony seems to be changing this trend, however, as the newly announced NGP appears to allow easy cross-porting between console and portable titles. However, because of this, rewriting the PSP-level engine (as described above) is no longer a valid development model for portable gaming. With NGP being announced as a HD system, skipping high-definition asset development due to costs may no longer be a viable option.
So, did Sony change the game with the NGP? Never underestimate Japan’s unwillingness to change. The introduction of a HD portable may force Japanese game makers to ignore the NGP in favor of the 3DS, which more closely resembles the hardware of their out-of-date development model. Assuming development costs for NGP are similar to PS3, Sony has some work to do in convincing developers to stick to the Sony brand. At the press conference for NGP, it was announced that Capcom has already ported its MT Framework engine to the NGP – a great start for the developer. Capcom is one of the few third-party Japanese companies that has been successful this generation, and that fact has a lot to do with their early focus on cross-platform compatibility and development of a framework that can run on many different configurations of hardware.
Using Darwinian language, Japanese game makers need to evolve. Let’s hope they do so, or they may end up like some subspecies of the Galapagos giant tortoise: slow and extinct.
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