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Much of the discussion around the games industry here in Japan is taken up by the difficulties big companies like Nintendo are going through. Given that the big companies dominate the scene and that game studies here pay a lot of attention to industry, this means that most discussions with games researchers eventually circle around to the downturn in the industry and what Japan can do about it. But, what exactly is the problem with the Japanese games industry? Here are some of signs that worry games researchers here:

• Smart-phones are replacing dedicated mobile game systems like the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP in terms of game sales. A story in the Globe and Mail points to a blog entry by Flurry blogger Peter Farago asking Is it Game Over for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP? (Nov. 9, 2011) The is based on US data that shows that between 2009 and 2011 Nintendo and Sony went from owning 81 % of the portable game software market to only 42% of the market.
• Nintendo posted its first ever loss. Nintendo is losing money as reported in a story in the Globe by Yoshiyuki Osada and Isabel Reynolds, Nintendo to post first every annual net loss. On Thursday, Oct. 27th, 2011 Nintendo said it expected its first annual loss ever and attributed it to weak demand for the 3DS (due partly to lack of games that exploit the 3D) and a strong yen (which affects Nintendo because a large percentage of their sale are exports.)
• Japanese game developers seemed to be slow to take advantage of the emerging markets of social games and casual games. Japan’s largest social network Mixi, for example, doesn’t seem to be gaining members and their operating profit is dropping. Most developers seem to be designing games only for the Japanese market leaving the global market to others. Only recently is DeNA moving their Mobage gaming network to Android and iOS and the Android version isn’t getting good reviews.

There is another side to the story. As Ashton Raze puts it in a the Telegraph Super Mario 3D Land review (Nov. 18, 2011),

While current talk of Nintendo is often mired in share prices and falling stocks, it’s easy to forget that they also make games like this; joy-filled, effortless romps, pure blue-sky gaming that can easily be hailed as the reason to own a given system.

Nintendo has also been here before. Osamu Inoue in a somewhat enthusiastic book Nintendo Magic documents how Satoru Iwata (the current president of Nintendo) led the company to record profitability after the poor performances of the Virtual Boy, N64, and GameCube. Eventually they got it right with the DS and Wii. Nintendo has the cash reserves and creativity reserves to weather poor years and systems that aren’t hits. The question is whether a strategy of focused on selling tightly coupled systems and software will work now that smartphones are powerful enough to be mobile systems, and gamers are moving to casual social games and large-scale virtual game worlds all playable on PCs? Who needs dedicated mobile systems or consoles?

Some of the questions that come up when we discuss the perceived downturn are:

• Is there really a problem? What is the scale of the downturn? Is it the Japanese game industry in general or particular companies like Nintendo or just a strong yen?
• What are the causes of the downturn? Is it due to a failure to anticipate new gaming models from MMORGs to social games? Is it due to conservative thinking by management in the industry? Is it due to a dominance of console/system thinking? Is it due to a strong yen or poor global business strategies? Or is it due to a shrinking population of new players and developers?
• What can government do to help? The Japanese government has traditionally not supported their manga/anime/game industries the way they were involved with other industries. There are signs the government is now getting involved – is that a good thing? Does coordinated planning work?
• What are Japan’s strengths? What can they build on to resurrect the games industry?
• What role can the academy play in this? What should be taught? What sort of research would benefit the industry?
• What should be next for the games industry in Japan? Should they keep on doing what they do best or should they refocus? How can industry, academy and government together reinvigorate the export industry?

 

There are small themed bars in all the Japanese cities. They can by 7 floors up by elevator with a little billboard on the street or down a corridor off a back alley with nothing to advertise the bar on the street. Café la siesta is just such a bar in Kyoto dedicated to the generation of 8-bit games like the NES.

Continue reading Cafe la siesta – 8-bit Edition Game Bar

I have posted a large set of photographs about Den-Den Town, also known as Nipponbashi. This is a neighborhood of Osaka that I visited with Jaakkoo Suominen especially to see the retro-gaming stores where you can buy old game systems and games.

I’m slowly going through the images and annotating them and I’ll probably go back with more specific questions. I took a couple of the eroge (erotic games) because there were so many and it is so clearly a big part of the game industry here in Japan (see this article on Dating simulator games inspire legion of followers – and detractors.) I have blurred out any details of private parts for the sake of decency.

I also took photographs of other things as we worked our way from game store to game store including the picture above of the street person on the main street with their belonging tidly packed up under a tarpaulin. I was struck by the contrast between the busy stores full of old toys and the man peacefully sleeping there in Den-Den town.

How do Japanese researchers see the globalization of games? As I mentioned in my last post, games researchers in Japan are negotiating their field and how it will intersect with game studies elsewhere. While there seemed to be a consensus that they needed to be sufficiently fluent in English to both read and publish in English (the way engineering or medical researchers here do), they don’t see globalization the way we do. First of all games research here is much more interested in supporting industry than game studies in the West. What they call game studies here spans both what we call game studies and the work done in computer science, engineering, and business that work closely with industry. Game studies here is imagined to be supportive of industry in the sense that it should produce well trained students and their research should benefit industry. By contrast, game studies in the West like many humanities and social science fields, is imagined as needing a critical relation with industry. I will be looking more at the relationship with industry in other posts as it came up in many interviews, for the moment let me draw attention to the importance of Asia to Japanese game studies. Japanese youth culture exports well to Asia giving Japan “soft power” in the region, but Japan is also beginning to outsource content creation to countries like China where animators are cheaper. As one can imagine, Asia is Japan’s neighborhood historically, culturally and now economically in a way that it is not for Canada. One of the experts here in Japan on the Asian game market is Professor Nakamura.

Continue reading RCGS Part 3: Game studies beyond Japan and other issues