The Japanese software industry, at least in the traditional markets, has had a rough year, with an 8% drop in retail sales for 2011. Now there's a report from researcher Mirko Enrkvist at the University of Gothenburg which reports that 48% of the participating Japanese companies did not make a profit last year. While only 25% of the CEOs queried actually responded to the survey overall (and some items received a lower response rate), it's clear that there's more than a few Japanese developers struggling to make money developing games.
One of the interesting conclusions from the study is that the most important sources of knowledge for the developers were users and competitors, and very few used knowledge from research institutions (like universities). Interestingly, almost 58% of respondents reported using game engines during the past three years. Commercially available AI programs were used by less than 36% and, and physics engines by about 41%.
The report noted that these percentages show that Japanese developers were less technologically sophisticated than their Western counterparts. The Japanese developers also reported working as an outsourcing partner for another company (63.5%), while nearly 89% reported outsourcing part of their own projects.
The full report can be found as a PDF here.
