The Japanese market has been facing trouble lately. In a recent interview with Capcom’s Keiji Inafune, the man behind Mega Man and Dead Rising said he believes that unless the Japanese developers start working on games that appeal to the Japanese market, speculation about Japan's gaming market disappearing could become reality.
“Every year that I come to E3, year in and year out, the one thing I’ve noticed is that it seems like the Japanese game developer share seems to be getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “If you look at the major titles, they’re now primarily western.
“If you look at all the different signs and all the billboards, most of those are western titles. A lot of the key announcements are also western titles. I think to myself sometimes, if we keep on this course, the Japanese gaming market will disappear totally.”
“We can’t just rely on our own skill, our own Japanese developer skill and know-how, to steer us through this dark time,” he said. “It’s going to have to come through collaborative efforts and co-operation. It’s our U.S. staff, our European staff, working closely with them.
“Of course we are working with a lot of different western developers as well. It’s being able to share their knowledge and information, to collaborate with them on a very in-depth level, that’s going to allow us to grow as a company and to be able to understand how the market is changing in the west, and allow us to be competitive in those markets. That’s going to be essential for us.”
Capcom has already announced that they have scaled back on outsourcing to western markets for games and has remained committed to focusing on internal Japanese development.
