Today, Murase-san conducted the last installment of our lesson on the Japanese game industry, looking at the overseas market for Japanese games. Continuing with the doom-and-gloom trend of the domestic market, it's no surprise that Japanese consoles and games are also not doing well globally. In 1998, a typical top ten sales chart would have been dominated by seven or more Japanese titles. By 2005, that figure would have been reduced to only two games or so.
One main reason for the decline in Japanese game sales abroad would be the Microsoft Xbox. With that, foreign companies have improved their game development skills as well as their business models. Another reason is the nature of the US and European market, who prefer more realistic looking games to the cute or otherwise stylistic offerings from Japan. Japanese game developers are still highly respected for the quality of their work, despite the poor sales performance.
Americans prefer realistic.
Japanese prefer cute.
A comparison of Japanese and overseas developer behavior also yields an interested trend. Because the Wii practically dominates the local market, Japanese developers would rather create games for the Wii. Likewise, they have no problem with creating platform-exclusive game titles. US developers, however, often seek to create simultaneous release of the same title on multiple platforms - PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2 and PC. Very few Japanese company have the capability to do that.
In the afternoon, Kawashima-san took us for "Post Production 2"and "Props Modeling", which turned out to be very fundamental stuff. At 4pm, the three of us, together with our lecturers and translator Robert, went for a knowledge sharing session from Ito-san. He had attended the recent GDC and brought back lots of knowhow and experience. Ito-san spoke really fast, but he showed us a lot of interesting slides from the conference, and we learnt a lot of new things. 本当に勉強になりました！
P.S. Kawashima-san still hasn't figured out why transparency doesn't work on our PS3 debug stations. We're still waiting for a solution.
You should have said American prefers blood. Which is not that far from the truth :P
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