transient thoughts

Once upon a time, people who played games were Gamers - a proud fraternity, dwelling on the fringes of society, basking in the artificial glow of a cathode ray tube. But with gaming becoming more mainstream, and more and more people buying and playing games, something’s changed. A schism has formed, and where once there were just Gamers, now we have Hardcore gamers, and Casual gamers.

More and more, this dichotomy is also showing up within the games themselves. Whilst there has long been a plethora of what could be dubbed casual games on the net, until relatively recently most people would not have counted these as part of the “proper” games industry. Most famously with the advent of the Wii, there has been a big push to draw this audience into the more mainstream gaming scene, and also to expand the type of games being made to include these people.

I’d call this a good thing, overall. More variety in marketable games means more opportunities for creativity, and more chances for people to carve out their own little creative niche, doing what they want to be doing; a much wider demographic of people buying games leads to an expansion in the industry financially; and the gradual shift in the demographics of the gaming audience can only contribute to the wider social acceptance of games, which could make a huge difference to the industry in general - at one end of the spectrum it could help see games recognised as a “real” form of art, at the other it’s one more thing that can be used to support getting more financial support from governments and other non-industry bodies.

There is a less pleasant side to this whole split though. There is divide between the two sides, and it’s one that’s ever widening. More and more emphasis seems to be put on how casual a game might be, as a tool to try and sell it to a wider audience. On the other side, there seems to be something of a backlash against casual games from the hardcore gamers - that, on some level, they’re not “real” games. All around, there seems to be a feeling that it’d be impossible to make a game that successfully appeals/caters to both audiences.

In addition to the benefits of the expanding industry, I think there’s a lot that both styles of game could offer to the other, and would love to see more people try to blend the two together. At the same time, I think some attitudes towards the genres need to change too before it would even be viable.

Time will tell

written by .klik2 \\ tags: casual gaming, games industry, hardcore gaming, wii

The opening keynote of this year’s TGS was an interesting affair… Presented by Yoichi Wada, the President of Square-Enix (but wearing his CESA Chairperson hat), it looked at where the Japanese industry is these days.

Japan, once the superpower of the video games industry, is more and more taking a back seat to the West. And to listen to Wada (and the following panel on the subject) it seems, as much as anything else, that it’s a situation born of Japanese culture. Individual developers are quite insular, and don’t really interact and share with one another; they are more conservative - in terms of the huge proportion of sequels, and also in terms of sticking to fairly static genres; and they don’t really understand the Western markets and how to best situate themselves in them.

These days, Japanese titles are facing more and more competiton in the West, especially when looking at critical responses for games. While I don’t have any hard data, it seems like most of the major blockbusters are being spawned by US developers. There are still a few bastions of the Japanese industry in the West, most notably JRPGs and fighting games, which could be said to capitalise on many of the traits of Japanese games. At the same time both genres are niches, to some extent, some of those traits are becoming more and more of a burden to some games when it comes to broader audiences (for example, look at the amount of criticism of the story presentation in MGS4).

Consider the reverse too, the performance of Western games in the Japanese market. Around a decade ago, Japanese people bought Japanese games, almost exclusively. The original Xbox, which garnered very little support from Japanese developers, did very poorly. Nowadays, Western titles have gained a notable foothold into the Japanese market. Looking at game stores here, and particularly looking at the latest generation of consoles, retailers are giving a significant amount of shelf space to Western releases.

So, too look at title of this post, is the Japanese games industry too Japanese? I don’t think so (in fact, it’s not even really a fair question), but it is currently facing some unique challenges.

The real question is: where does the Japanese industry go next? And how far will (and can) it go?

written by .klik2 \\ tags: CESA, japanese industry, JRPGs, the future, Yoichi Wada