Inafune slams Japanese industry for "making awful games"
Capcom creative head says "Japan is at least five years behind"
Capcom's head of global research and development, Keiji Inafune, has damned the Japanese game industry in a New York Times interview, claiming that it is "at least five years behind" the rest of the world.
The statement echoes previous comments which the Mega Man designer made about the state of the Japanese industry, when he claimed in 2009 that it was "finished". More recently he had appeared to change his mind and become less pessimistic about the future of his trade in Japan, telling attendees of Capcom's TGS press conference this year that "the Japanese industry is not dead as long as Capcom is still around".
His words to the NYT were uncompromising, however.
"I look around Tokyo Games Show, and everyone's making awful games; Japan is at least five years behind. Capcom is barely keeping up. The ideas, game play, design - there's no diversity, no originality," he told the paper.
"I want to study how Westerners live, and make games that appeal to them."
Inafune seemed to divide the blame between a lack of creativity on the part of Japanese designers and an absence of financial clout from their publishers.
"A lot of designers, if they find a genre that works for them, they stick with it. A lot of designers just stick to a set formula. That doesn't work any more. You can't just tweak the graphics, work just on image quality. You can't compete on that. The business side is not keeping up with investment. You need to be prepared to invest 4 billion yen or more on a game, and then spend 2 billion yen more to promote it. But Japanese companies can't do that. So we're losing out to the West in terms of investment in games."
Attendance at this year's Tokyo Game Show reached a record high this year, showing that the domestic market hasn't declined - but Capcom's profits were also at their lowest since 2004.
Obviously, this depends entirely on what type of game you are looking at however.
If Japanese developers merely parrot the West, originality is likely to suffer, trodden beneath the heel of Yet-Another-Space-Marine-FPS-Ooh-How-Edgy.
My problem is with Japanese companies given Japanese franchises to western developers i.e. Silent Hill and the next DMC. It`s not like I would not trust Ninja Theory in doing a good game, but rather the possibility that all that made the previous games good and fun will not be there because it did not match what western developers think about games.
Does anybody else find it ironic that it is Inafune who claims a lack of originality and sticking with design is killing Japanese developers as he continues to release Mega Man IX, Mega Man X and Mega Man Universe?
Pot meet kettle.
And seriously, a lot of western games are just FPS after FPS and sequels after sequels. The ones I think of are creative were titles like Scribblenauts not Halo or Call of Duty. Japanese titles like the Professor Layton series and Another Code are truly innovative titles as compared to most stuff Capcom made.
I think if Capcom wants to appease the western audience for better business it's fine but not slamming their fellow developers and make themselves look good.
I'll grant that Japan has fallen back from the pinnacle it once held but Capcom is different than the others in their reduction in relevancy. Japanese development is and will most likely always be a very vital and important piece of the industry but Capcom most certainly isn't holding their own any better than the others right now.