Monday, September 20, 2010

Dying Japanese video game industry

I'm hardly surprised looking at the things they pump out month after month. Its the same shit over and over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/technology/20game.html?_r=2

From the article we can see how they are trying to westernize their games. Yeah you can tell from games like The Last Remnant that Cent ripped apart. Even games like NIER that I never played and just read about. Apparently there is a she-male but that has nothing to do with it. The thing is in the Japanese version you get a girlyboy but in the English version you get a muscleman.

The problem is not the characters, the problem is that over the years there isn't much change in game play or storyline. That's not the biggest reason though, the biggest reason would be that Japan just can't compete with the amount of games coming out of the west. Even if sales of Xbox360 sucks balls over in Japan there is a huge market of games in the west. That's why the market for Japanese games seems small.

Overall many Japanese game companies are seeing loss of sales in their games. Maybe if they stop making games with some spiky haired anime boy trying to save the world and get the girl then people would be more interested in playing them. You get lame dialogue stories and two dimensional characters with a cliched plot. At one time pumping those games out one after another worked but the gamers of today has higher standards for their games. Western gamers pump out similar games over and over too, just look at the sports titles. But since I don't play sports games I can't really comment on those. The games I play are action games, RPGs and Shoot em ups mostly. So those are the games I will talk about.

How many times have you seen a Japanese RPG main character save a world? I started gaming playing those games and now I can barely touch one without puking with blood as you can see from the posts I posted. There are games that try new things like Persona and a lot of people seemed to like it. I didn't. I felt it was a step forward from the cliched RPGs but it included many new horrible things. The western market isn't so full of RPGs. You see a lot more FPS, hell I don't think I even seen a Japanese FPS. They really need to expand on their games, they need more online play, they need a lot more. The old Nintendo and Playstation days are over. Competition has arrived, you can't pump out the same crap and expect to sell when better games are coming out everyday. Most hardcore gamers today are older now. I grew up playing SNES and Playstation. I don't want to play the same shit I played so many years ago.

Here's another article on Japanese gaming clicky!

In 2009, Japanese games have dropped 24% in sales. The western market is huge. They can't really make games that the Japanese want to play and westerners want to play as well. Its just too different. Japanese gamers seem to be closed off from the world. You might not agree with my views and I may sound pretty biased but we'll see in the coming years. The gaming industry is still rapidly changing.