Could Japan’s Unique Infrastructure Hinder Healthy Growth and Expansion for Games?

January 17th, 2011By Category: Uncategorized

Japan’s decade spent living on the cutting edge of mobile tech, from handsets to feature sets to infrastructure, made the nation the envy of international makers of handheld devices and the source of rumors as to ‘what the Japanese have’, occasionally whispered by “eye-witnesses” who managed a business trip or study abroad during mobile’s formative years in other nations. For many, Japan represented what mobile phone users could look forward too under the assumption that it would only be a matter of time until the rest of the world ‘caught up’.

What no one anticipated was that the next big market leaders weren’t actually playing catch-up at all – they were blazing a new trail.

While the tech and infrastructure in Japan supporting mobile devices is certainly praiseworthy, the introduction of smartphones (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc.) in the western market has sculpted the way that the average consumer now interacts with her mobile phone as part of her daily routine, solidifying the device as an integral part of her social life and supporting the individual’s personal needs, needs which aren’t clearly reflected in the Japanese mobile market. It’s thanks to this rather open platform that a great number of games are now able to be created which experiment with new game ideas, redefining the concept of what exactly a “game” can be, while further inspiring the development community at large.

This means that the manner in which people create software in order to support and supplement the user experience is also different – this includes games, with the most significant feature being, not a touch-screen interface or the recreation of a PC web-like user experience, but the open nature in which games and applications can be developed, distributed, and experienced. A lot of game developers outside of Japan hence never had to consider developing specifically for the Japanese mobile market or its dedicated platforms, resulting in rather different development and business models being born, with the current iterations of iPhone inspired smartphones appearing to be solidifying themselves as the standard by which at least the next several years of mobile services (and gaming) will be built on. While the iPhone and iPod Touch are well on their way to becoming an additional ‘always on-hand’ device for many Japanese consumers, the ‘standard’ cell phone still serves the needs of the community well enough, keeping developers focused on the larger install base, and users’ attention on what’s already available and convenient.

A second concern is that the standardization of the mobile phone as the all-around go-to device ahead of other markets deceptively negated the need for what is currently another innovation hotbed in the game space: the good-old PC.

While smartphones may be relatively ‘open’ now, the PC has essentially always been open, but it’s only now that there finally exists a plethora of free and cheap development software and tools, which combined with arguably the most versatile gaming platform and interface available, allows for much more affordable development, a great deal more room for experimentation, and enough social networking options and distribution outlets in order to make lower cost small-scale development, self-publishing and promotion a viable option.

The new “cutting edge” on this platform is no longer demonstrated by technical prowess, but by innovative ideas, often merging relatively ‘old’ design elements together with new ways of incorporating community, making the player feel like a more integral part of the game experience through creative use of technology (versus ‘flashy’ use of technology), or by presenting concepts which likely wouldn’t be ‘cleared’ by a publisher due to the financial risk associated with presenting ‘too new a concept’ for the mass consumer market. Looking overseas, the breakout hit Minecraft serves as a fine example, and at a time when single-player games are often said to be somewhat of a dying breed, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the survival-horror hit from developer Frictional Games, has according to the game’s developers, instilled a “new confidence for the PC”, stating that “The sales . . . are more than enough to motivate developing a game with the PC as the main (and even only) platform,” and that, “other developers that consider making their game exclusive to a console might want to think again.”

Japan’s developers struggling to clear proposals for the development of larger scale and budget games with publishers now have another lower-cost option in the form of popular social game networks such as GREE, Mixi, and Mobage, a savior to many, which managed to develop a significant market presence at just the right time. The incredible talent pool in Japan will unquestionably continue to thrive and produce new, quality content utilizing both new and traditional development and publishing models for these platforms – the real concern is the bipolar nature of the market, where neither pole has yet proven to offer many examples of innovation in forms which are striving to tap into the largely untapped potential of games as a unique and powerful medium.

Photo Credit: Karl Baron / Flickr

Author of this article

AUTOMATON

AUTOMATON is a video game-based media website owned by Active Gaming Media Inc. We are completely dedicated to our motto of “Veracity in Gaming” in that we refuse to sell positive reviews or coverage for games or publishers. AUTOMATON’s multicultural writer base provides an eclectic variety of voices and perspectives in the interest of providing both truth and entertainment.

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Comments

  • Takashi says:

    hey aho! you really the ahole. We invented sumo samurai and much else. What did your stinking country invent apart stupid levis jeans and hamburger so everyone get fat and die!!!! We dont trade with other countries because they have bad products because Japan is number one. We are self sufficiemt you fool!!! My whole family live in one house, my grandparents still work to grow us food and we can even save money for new car. Idiot gaijin only come here to do bad things to our superior woman. Get lost aho you scum!!!!!

  • aho! says:

    this countries going to lose more than games aho! they already lost tens of thousands of jobs to china, india and elsewhere. with more vacant buildings than the 80s real estate bubble burst. why? because these assholes think their outdated and EXTREMELY SLOW culture matters more than the food on their plate. nobody wants to do business in japan any more. the only people that don’t recognize this FACT is the japanese dinosaurs themselves. just ask them, they’ll tell you how happy they are returning back to the stone age, and how they don’t need any trade with the rest of the world. and meanwhile… back at the farm… they’ll say this while eating the 62.7% of the food they import from the u.s. and china. now bite the hand that feeds aho!

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