'The Development Speed Is Amazing': Shuhei Yoshida Says Japanese Studios Can't Keep Pace with China

Hmm, I wonder why........

Gaming really is screaming towards that Capitalism end game

Remember how getting three mainline Final Fantasy titles in three years was a norm?

Not surprised really, both countries have a pretty bad work culture but China might be worse (potentially). Personally, I feel China is beating Japan since they’re getting more investment. I mean, I don’t see Japan giving a day off just to play a game (Wukong). I also think of the show To Be Hero X which hired many big name Japanese staff and was made up of multiple studios working together. I also don’t see a world where Mappa, Ufotable and Madhouse work together on a single show. At the end of the day, high quality entertainment reflects well on China so we’re seeing a lot more investment.

@SeaDaVie ah yes, completely forgot the sheer size of China honestly makes a big difference in output, at least in terms of speed.

@themightyant it's likely just a country size difference. Japan is densely populated but fairly small, while China is BIG in every way. So there's just more people to throw at any & every problem while having a similarly bad work culture. Their decision to mostly work with open engines like UE5 & Unity means on-boarding any random new hire is faster too.

The more Chinese games the better tbh. They hey crap review scores from western media but most of them are decent. They also don’t have any identity woke stuff. Makes you wonder why western devs are closing down so rapidly while Chinese ones are starting to thrive.

With Tencent's stake in Ubisoft and Saudi Arabia's EA deal, those of us who want to make ethical choices when buying video games are seeing fewer and fewer options.

To be fair, companies like Mihoyo prioritize quantity over quality and they lack the originality of the japanese devs. Genshin Impact exists because of Breath of the Wild and Star Rail exists because of Persona 5. Coincidentally, both japanese games.

as others said, the trade-off for content churn is quality. I'm not saying churn doesn't print money - it obviously does - but I would never trade a good game with a 3+ year dev cycle for a game with a 1.5-month patch cycle but where 80% of the new playable content is mashing X through unskippable dialogue.

And I'm not saying this as a 'gacha games bad' naysayer - I've played Genshin, I've played HSR, I've played ZZZ, I've played WuWa, I've played P5X, and I played the ***** out of Infinity Nikki. It's like, eat fast food once in a while and it's a treat, eat fast food every single day for months and you really start to get sick of the taste of chicken nuggets.

Methinks labor laws lol. You make maybe enough to feed your family in a tiny apartment have no rights and can be fired for anything. The dev teams are probably 1000+ at the cost of maybe less than a 100 person dev team in Europe or America. Anyone thinking it's anything but has their head in the sand

@47Levi Some Japanese Companys Kinda do give workers time off when a new Dragon Quest game comes out.

I mean they work on like 7 games at once and they're all kinda the same thing.

The games have potential but suffer from stories designed to never end and be bloated over decades to come until EOS

Early Hi3rd had great characters and writing but things fall apart when you mandate 100 characters all lazily built of the same 3 character models

I don't think it's solely because China has more population than Japan or how they can pay less but "forced" their devs to do more crunch. India for example has 1.45 billion population and low salary but we didn't see them making games like China.

It's just Japan still stuck with old tradition and dreaming their bubble era that already gone decades ago. They didn't improved much. Meanwhile China keeps learning and improving from their mistakes to get better and better results.

Just look how company like Nintendo who's still doing baffling decisions that made you wonder if their boomer higher ups are still trap in the 60-70's.

So it's not a surpise if Chinese devs gets better and better to the point Japanese and other devs can't keep up with their pace. Their success doesn't happen with just one night but they worked hard for almost a decade to reach this point.

And it's no wonder why SIE decided to invest on Chinese devs back in 2016 with China Hero Project. They've predicted Chinese devs has potential to become bigger and rival or even surpass Japanese, EU, and American devs which is happening right now.

@PuppetMaster Don’t know about the quality (haven’t played any of the big Chinese made games) but the Chinese pop culture market is huge and like a lot of markets, values stuff which speaks to it. To not invest in China is to leave a lot of money on the table.

It’s incredible that Ne Za 2 is the biggest animated movie ever and made almost all its money in China. On the flipside lots of markets are cool with stuff shaped by cultures and myths they don’t know much about (Black Myth Wukong made most of its money in China but did well among Soulslike fans everywhere).

Yeah China's entry into the video game space (which technically already occurred in atleast the 90s but has in a recent timeframe gained international recognition) has really shined over the Japanese gaming business in several ways in the past six years or so.
If Japan ever intends to take the threat from their follow eastern competitors seriously then they do a good job of NOT showing it at all imo.

@Carnage I'm not yet watch Ne Za 2, only seen the trailer. But i think China animation also helped how fast they advanced in video game.