By Nelson Schneider - 07/31/16 at 03:12 PM CT
Japan is no longer a force in the videogame industry. We simply have to accept this fact. As I covered last year, all of Japan’s biggest, oldest, and most beloved videogame studios are committing ritual suicide one after another, mostly sacrificing themselves upon the altar of mobile gaming. Things have changed little in a year, with Capcom now facing down dismal sales and profits. Why is everything going so wrong in the nation that revived an industry on the brink of collapse in the 1980s? Well, in Capcom’s case – as well as many others – it simply comes down to a lack of productivity. If Japanese companies don’t produce killer games that sell consoles and build their reputations as providers of great entertainment, they will wither and die on the vine as new generations of incoming gamers wonder who these companies are, having never heard of them, while old, jaded gamers fume with resentment about how far these companies have fallen from their best.
The loss of Japanese development studios is an incredible blow to gaming, and especially to console gaming, as Japanese games and console games were one and the same for the vast majority of gaming’s history. Western developers have only jumped into console development with both feet very recently, and only as a result of two generations of miserable, PC-like consoles that didn’t drag them too far outside of their comfort zones. Even so, Western "AAA" developers have been dropping like flied since they made this leap, with the industry shedding as many as 80% of them since the start of the 7th Generation.
As with any business, though, where there is slack, there is opportunity. In the gaping void left behind by so many suicidal samurai, some knights errant have moved in to setup shop. With so many Japanese studios failing to produce a significant quantity of games, upstart Western developers are jumping at the opportunity to make themselves known by filling gaps in the annual release schedule. Unfortunately, instead of replacing like with like, we’re simply seeing the gaps filled with garbage.
Consider for a moment a few relatively “new” and unknown Western developers, like Spiders, Cyanide, Focus Home, and Ripstone. Go ahead and search the MeltedJoystick database for these companies (or use the convenient links I provided). These companies, and more like them, have been relatively prolific in the same timespan that Japanese companies haven’t (with the exceptions, of course, of Compile Heart, NIS, and Gust). Yet between them, they have produced very little of value. While we still have “AAA” games coming from the West and occasionally from Japan, the single-A titles that Japan did so well for so long have dropped away and been replaced by B-rate titles by these largely European neophytes.
In movies, B-rate films were largely panned and treated as a laughing stock amongst critics and audiences. Occasionally, one of these poorly done films would gather a cult following due to how ridiculously horrible it was (much like what has happened around From Software’s Western-pandering ‘Souls’ franchise), but for the most part, they were appropriately ignored and forgotten. This is the state of non-“AAA” and non-Indie games in the current market.
These B-rate developers and publishers aren’t happy to create something original or inspired by an older style of game that is no longer “profitable enough” to get the “AAA” treatment, like Indie developers. No, they want to break into the “AAA” market themselves, and thus create bland, soulless copies of the already bland, soulless games they idolize. Yet, without the massive, overblown budgets of “AAA” games for things like cinematic cutscenes and top-notch voiceacting, B-rate games simply reveal the formula for the bowl of soggy cardboard that is it.
