Topic: Are Japanese games back on top over Western games again?

For a very long time the media has been claiming that the Japanese games market has been stagnant and lagging behind western publishers. Personally I've never felt this as a gamer (especially with Nintendo), but where previously games like Halo, Assassins Creed, COD, Mass Effect, Arkham, and Fallout have had all the plaudits, recently quite a few of them have been criticised for becoming stale or just bad games. During the last 6 months the media has been far more interested with Dark Souls 3, Final Fantasy XV, The Last Guardian, Nier, Persona V, and of course Breath of The Wild.

Do you think this is a real thing, and will it sustain?

@MrGawain quality wise? Maybe but its too early to tell. but sales wise no

Just take a look at this picture Peek-a-boo posted in the PS4 thread:

Mind you, these are just the PS4 exclusives and don't include last year's games like The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV. I don't think we're going to see a repeat of the recent 4 months anytime soon, but I do think that Japanese devs have finally found their place in the industry again. Of course, part of this is coincidence. We've been waiting for an eternity on games like The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy, and to see them release mere from each other was nothing but coincidence. Other examples are Resident Evil, a new direction for the franchise after 1 or 2 lacklustre games. NieR: Automata, a big improvement over the original NieR, thanks for PG's involvement. Nioh another great entry in the popular sub-genre Demon Souls and Dark Souls created.

It took them a while to adjust to the current gen console, plus we've seen some long awaited games release in a short time span, and just a fantastic line-up of mostly Japanese developed first party games this year. Don't think this momentum will last, but I do think this means that we're going to see more stellar games from the land of the rising sun.

This year feels like a little bit of a revival but it's too soon to tell if the Japanese devs are back for sure. I will give them this though... Unlike their Western counterparts who are obsessed with forcing their obnoxious politics into everything and listening to agenda pushers who don't buy or play games, the Japanese are simply focused on trying to make good games. Not everything is a hit, but at least I feel like their hearts are in the right place. Western developers, with the exception of a few, have become nothing more than a bunch of pandering fools.

It's so nice seeing non-Nintendo Japanese devs creating wonderful, full console experiences again. The console gaming space was crowded with boorish Western games for almost an entire generation: good to see the kings have returned.

That's because after the recent drought of Japanese games trying too hard to be like western games they have finally found a balance of both styles. Xenoblade started things in the right direction and other games have followed suit.

Resident Evil tried to get away from its roots and be more western with far too much action. What made the games great to begin with was the thrill and scare you got from playing the games. Also the puzzles were a big thing for me as just running from scene to scene attack enemies got boring fast.

@Gamer83 All games are political to a point. It might just be that you agree with the Japanese politics so it doesn't seem as obvious. When someone makes a choice to make this game over that game or to have this content over that content, that's a political choice.

Like, you've got Resident Evil which has always been aggressively anti-military testing (and even just weapon development in general). And the countless anti-religion RPGs. Tales Of games are often suspicious of authority figures like the church or the aristocracy (heck, put most classic JRPGs in there). And then you've got games like Senran Kagura whose political alignment I won't discuss because I don't want to derail/light NL on fire again.

Anyway I love them, but I don't really think Japanese games are going to make a revival at this point. They'll break back into the market, but the CODs and GTAs are still going to pull the big sales money for at least this generation.

@World
Metal Gear has also been heavy on the politics. I don't care about politics in games if it fits the story and the story is told well, I guess what I'm talking about is more agenda pushing. In the West it's a real problem these days. The whole blow up over Link remaining a male character in the new Zelda game, for example, that's the kind of 'politics' I'm talking about that is annoying the hell out of me (before anybody says it, no I don't think every character has to be a straight, white male, so save the bullcrap, I just don't think we need to gender swap a character that has been established for over two decades). And the Western studios are listening to that group of people far too much. Fortunately sales for some of the games from certain studios are down. I don't know if it's a reflection of other people getting sick of the bs I'm sick of or if it's just because they think the games suck but if it forces more studios like Bioware and Ubisoft to rethink what they're doing, I'm all for that.

@Gamer83 Yeah, Metal Gear Solid is a good one too. That's probably the best one to come out of Japan's general anti-war stance.

And fair enough. You're more saying you don't like when the games' politics bleed into real-life? I hear that. Like, I can definitely appreciate something like an Overwatch appealing to a whole new generation of gamers, but sometimes you just want to discuss how to find the last shrine in BotW. Balance is good.

I haven't played a Western game in years (Citizens of Earth was the last, I think) so I'm probably not the best person to discuss (and, like you said, it's such a touchy issue these days) but I want to believe they started off with their hearts in the right place and then got super smug about it and that was the point where people jumped off.

To be honest, I wish Ubisoft's politics didn't include "a Rayman remake on every console since the PS2" but that's just me.

@World
I'm with you about Ubisoft. Less Rayman, more Red Steel and Beyond Good & Evil, please.

I think it's a mixture of coincidence of the right Japanese games finally coming out on time, and an implosion of the "big 3" Western publishers that have spent themselves into a hole and retreated to rehashing safe "hit-maker" franchises endlessly. The pendulum will probably swing the other way again as the Western publishers have had failure after failure smack them in the face and have to do some soul searching as the Japanese devs did prior.

But part from that I think the Japanese devs (including but not limited to Nintendo) suffered a MASSIVE shock with the 7th gen into 8th gen with "HD graphics" and such that the Western deves started, pushed, and inherited from it's PC gaming roots that just copy and pasted PC culture onto console and walked in with a HUGE head-start. Japanese devs were used to "console games" and continued with that mentality, Western devs we know today were really just PC devs prior and only moved to consoles when Microsoft entered and started making consoles into PCs (very much on purpose, the entire point of XBox was to save DirectX and Windows gaming from the rise of Playstation.) That, and the wave of "new" features and aesthetics PC gamers were already used to but console gamers had never seen before caught Japanese devs off guard. Worse their reaction was to try to "Westernize" as fast as possible which was a disaster. So what we're seeing now looks like the result of Japan recognizing that disaster, and regrouping a bit to figure out what it is they do well and differently and blend only as much westernization as is needed.

TL;DR: Mix of coincidental timing, Japan figuring the modern age out slowly, and the West overplaying their hand and suffering some failures yielding a temporary reversal that will probably reach more of a balance over another generation or so.

@Gamer83 "Unlike their Western counterparts who are obsessed with forcing their obnoxious politics into everything and listening to agenda pushers who don't buy or play games,"

Excluding Hideo Kojima.....

I think western developers definitely produced far better quality and quantity in the last generation of consoles.
I think it's more or less evened out now though. Some Japanese devs like SquareEnix do seem to still struggle quite a lot to get big games out on the modern hardware.
Compare their output to FromSoftware for example, and they just look clueless. Getting both Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 out for the newest hardware, within the space of 2 years, is incredible. Most devs trying to do that would end up with terrible games.

@Gamer83 Oh man, Beyond Good & Evil would be amazing! Still, if we got EITHER of those at this point on the Switch, I'd probably buy in. (See, I do like Western stuff; just the good stuff always goes on hiatus for all eternity).

I think you could have quite happily stopped there, seeing as it is probably the best reason one can provide!

Although I did have some fun last generation, it was easily the weakest one in terms of originality as well as the very noticeable absent of games from the Far East.

I believe I have already covered this subject before however, in terms of Japanese games, I can only really immediately think of Bayonetta, Dark (and Demon's) Souls, Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots, Street Fighter IV and the reinvention of Pac-Man (in Championship Edition DX).

As well as a handful of games that Nintendo put out on the Wii such as Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the usual Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Wii Sports.

I'm already convinced that this new generation blows the previous one out of the water in terms of games from the East, whereas developers from the West are churning away with a few observable highlights here and there.

****Trigger Warning, Corporate BS Rant****

Protip: Listen to this thematically appropriate song about corporate BS, it goes along nicely!

No.

They were never on the bottom to begin with.

Congratulations, you are joining the ever increasing ranks of 'gamers' brought in during the worst generation who realize they have been duped into being marketing tools, and are now looking around going 'wait a second'.

Games of the ilk you mentioned are not becoming bad, they were NEVER good. They are not becoming stale, they have ALWAYS been stale.

The difference between japanese games and the western games that got the plaudits is billions of marketing dollars worth of overbearing marketing campaigns and worst generation enthusiast media who loved the crap out of the attention they got from publishers, and had no problem being astroturfers, many hoping that they could get their foot in the door with the publishers they worshipped in surprise!! PR positions...

So you had major sites chock full of astroturfing journos looking for pr jobs in the companies they 'reviewed' games for, (wanna guess which country studios they had no chance working for?) slapping 9's and 10's on every terd with high production values and a huge marketing budget, snubbing every game thats not part of the western pr circle jerk.

Which, ladies and gentlemen is actually a TRUE example of ACTUAL manufactured demand as it relates to the videogame industry. Using overbearing marketing to make a mediocre product with a lot of supply more desired before people realize its just a terd covered in perfume (why do you think they push preorders so hard?) Ubisoft and the other 4 huge western conglomerates used these tactics to push games expected production values out of reach of mid tier studios, who were always a threat before, as they often drove game design progress and toppled the incumbents who kept repeating the same crud. So whats a creative/design bankrupt but money rich studio to do? Why focus on the things that can be linearly increased with money! All the things that have nothing to do with gaming! Hire more artists and graphics programmers, hire more writers, hire more voice actors, all the stuff that has nothing to do with actual game design progress and making good games, but is just cosmetic fluff stapled on from other mediums, and so expensive no studio without the billion dollar backing of a major publishing house will ever be able to afford. But uh oh, the games are terds, they only look good, what to do... OH! Use your billions in ad and pr budget to make sure the most focused on and endlessly lavished thing People talk about are the graphics vo and cutscenes! Game design! Actual real time traversal and combat! Thats obsolete! Who wants to actually do things that require skill? Actually turning towards the enemy you want to fight, actually getting the proper distance for an attack to hit? Actually having to time when to attack? Chump stuff, watch this (pushes attack button) character turns itself around does a triple flip dive stab, oh wait, the bad guys not in quite the right position
.. Akwardly slide the bad guy and player character together into the right place... Bit not quite, as the plater character stabs thin air a foot to the left of the enemies head and pantomimes a brutal looking auto attack mood while the bad guy plays along to the assault thats not actually touching him. See that, one button press and you get to watch 10 seconds of how awesome what you arent doing is! Good combat mechanics and design with tight hit hit boxes and control focused animation times? Thats bad design! I mean just look at how the graphics arent bleeding edge! And no voice for cutscenes! Thats terrible outdated gameplay! Slap your nuts on the controller and giggle like an infant with keys being jingled in their face clapping their hands watching how cool what they arent doing is? Thats modern design, not that stinky old actually do things design. Jingle jingle.

So games that you dont actually play, but simply watch mini cinematics activated by a button push became good design, anything that required you to actually play and have skill, like the daunting task of actually facing the direction your enemy is in became bad design, because slamming the attack button and hammering a tree because you are too stupid to face the direction you want to attack is clearly the games fault now.

The old guard put their foot down... And many did what they always did when publishing houses tried to go full wall-mart. Went to independent developers on PC. The publishers responded by using their newfound money from venture capitalists and other investors to buy those studios and liquidating their staff. Goodbye bullfrog. Goodbye origin, goodbye maxis goodbye dice (no, they arent, the real dice was liquidated the instant the aquisition was complete, there is no silent left in dice) goodbye bullfrog.... Pc games that were ported to consoles became ports of console versions. Independent developers are now kept in their place by the marketing narrative and games media. They are now 'indies' and they have 'risen' from nowhere and things are so much better now... Until you realize that indies in fact originally made call of duty, and battlefield, and Doom, and fallout and elder scrolls.... And that turning trail blazing milestones in gaming history into 8 bit 5 buck distractions is not 'rising'... It is the exact opposite.

It worked so well that ubisoft crowed in a recent investor meetingbthat after they destroyed the mid tier, they can keep remaking the same garbage and they make MORE MONEY PER RELEASE NOW THAT COMPETITION IS GONE than they did just a scant generation ago. They even made a nifty bar graph that included the other 4 major AAAAAAA western companies that helped them take a massive diarreah dump on my hobby. Oh and its adjusted for inflation. So, even taking into account inflation, these top 5 western publishers are ROLLING in more cash per release than they have ever made in history, and whats the narrative? Oh dont you see? They HAVE to slice complete games up into dlc they charge 20 bucks a peice for so you can have the full game. They HAVE to go pay to win, or nickel and dime for outfits and weapons that used to be in the compkete game... Dont you know games cost sooooo much more to make today that they cant afford to give a complete game for a single price up front. The reality is that despite the increased cost of todays games, these publishers are crushing it like they never have before.... Without microtransactions.

But even if you had infinite money, manufactured demand will not last forever if you dont match what you pitch in your marketing, with what is actually received. Every person is different, but given enough time all but the most easily manipulated will eventually see through the guilding. Which is where we are now.

Im going to look for that ubisoft investor meeting file before moving onto what went on in japan. Its important to see what they actually do and say.

All right I found the meeting Archives. Ill be using the slides from the slide show instead of posting massive blocks of text. I think Ive done enough of that for now.

Hey guys, fans of the big crappy open world games full of collectathon garbage with nothing really in them or any point in it? GOOD Because Ubisoft is bragging about being able to crap them out at an unprecedented rate, because they are the cheapest and easiest games to make on a factory line process, and their marketing has indoctrinated the worst generation into thinking terds are gold!

So saturated and heavily marketed is ubisofts open world design, that even people who dont like it have been indoctrinated into believing this is the only way to make open world games, despite the fact TONS of famous franchises in some of the most beloved games of all time many even over a decade old have been various open world design concepts! Chrono Trigger, Open World, Metroid, Open World, Zelda, Open World, Final Fantasy open world, star flight open world. But nope, now this is the only kind of open world that can exist in the minds of 'gamers', thanks marketing and pr!!

So what is being said here? Well, Ubisoft is bragging that by raising the barriers to entry in the videogame market, theyand their other 4 partners in crime, have run competition out of business, stagnated market progression, and have been able to keep crapping out the same kinds of games with new paint for over a decade, coupled with the fact almost half of their games are digital, and dont have all the cuts to profits of physical games, like the cost of discs, boxes, instruction manuals, shipping, storage, buying shelf space from retailers, yet they still make the customer pay for all those things instead of lowering the price of digital games, they are now making waaaaaaaay more money per game because of it.

Basically, here is what this was about. Long long ago, in a land far far away (A mere console generation ago) big sucky publisher incumbents had this nasty thorn in their side called the mid tier. See, the mid tier, kept making these super awesome games like doom and battlefield and tribes, that got these huge followings because of their awesome gameplay!!! Players flocked to these experiences leaving behind old ones that kept doing the same thing with better graphics! But the big incumbents didnt have talented programmers that could make unique new gameplay experiences! And if they didnt act fast, soon these upstarts with their good gameplay will be able to get venture capitalists and start their own franchise with graphics and production values on their new experience games to rival the incumbents witht heir old repeated terds! Then the incumbents go out of business and the upstarts become the new incumbents, the wheel turns and progress is made! Cant have that! So the publishers could spend money hiring new talent, or buying out the studios to keep up with the times.... Which sometimes didnt even pay off because they couldnt do it right and people didnt like their me too wannabe game,so they kept playing the old one even though the graphics werent as good and it didnt have two hours of cutscenes!!! And even then, after that, NEW mid tier studios would pop up with NEW experiences and it would start all again! Or... They could use their investor capital to raise the barrier of entry so mid tier couldnt compete. With huge marketing campaigns they pounded and pounded on the importance of expensive things like cutting edge graphics, voice acting, and cutscenes, and downplayed things that money couldnt buy like good mechanics and design. Once indoctrinated the worst generation wouldnt even look at anything that didnt have cutting edge graphics voice acting and sound. WIth no way to even be able to play, mid tiers couldnt possibly afford those production values, they dissapeared, and then later popped up with little 8-bit time wasters and a narrative that thats what an independant dev is supposed to be, and its not supposed to even think about competing with AAA but stay in its crappy place. And it was bought hook line and sinker and became knows as the 'rise' of the 'indies'.

So thats what Ubisoft is boasting about in this bar graph, by raising the barrier to entry for game makers impossibly high with production values only a massive conglomerate can afford, they have killed off the competition and threat of design progress, and are now making more money per game hand over fist than any time in history, by repackaging the same crap over and over. But remember, these poor publishers dont have any money because of the somehow mysteriously rising cost of videogame making they are totally not bragging about doing on purpose in this bar graph... They NEED to sell half a game for sixty bucks and charge you 20 bucks a pop for the last 4 chapters, they NEED to charge you for all the features and costumes and modes that used to come standard. They arent making any money on the games themselves!