In 2009, Inafune said that Japanese games were dead and behind. He repeated this at the 2012 GDC with a presentation on how backwards and failed Japan's games were.
Flashforward 10 years, and Capcom, Nintendo, and Fromsoft are dominating, while western games flounder.
How can one man be so wrong?
Other urls found in this thread:
Different times and close-proximity blindness to the actual state.
The triple-A fags in West had just recently kickstarted the (still ongoing) era of casual-gaming , and all the cancerous side phenomena that followed / had been implemented even earlier (ie. streamlined game desing, mobile shit, always online...). This skyrocketed the sales AND budgets of the generation's AAA games, making previous multi-million sale figures seem puny in comparison to DOZENS of millions of sold copies for CoD shit etc.
This is where even numerous industry veterans jumped off the wagon, because the new super stressful high-budget / high risk situation became unbearable.
Japanese games were in a pretty bad state around that time. Luckily the west shot themselves in the foot with dumbass woke shit so now Japan is killing it.
Inafune was a massive Westaboo and jelly of the easy casual-bux being milked from the normies in the West at the time.All the boomer execs in Nippon were seriously trying to get rid of oldschool game dev businesses around 2010, worst example being KONAMI, instead switching to cheaper and more profitable mobile shit.
It was also the era of "We want CoD audience!!" which ruined countless franchises.
Microsoft and the Western industry had been running an anti-Japanese games propaganda machine for quite awhile at that time. Japanese games were still fine but America decreed that Japanese Games were dead.
Also Inafune is a conman. He was probably just drooling over seeing how much money western MMOs could rake in every month with zero developer effort. Mighty #9 was shit and he was busy at work launching kickstarters for multiple other projects even before he release his initial pitch (which turned out to be a turd.) Maybe if he had actually given attention to making the game good instead of trying to con internet welfare from suckers it would've turned out good instead of being so shit the backers actually wanted to REMOVE themselves from being credited backers, who knows?
>It was also the era of "We want CoD audience!!" which ruined countless franchises.
I remember being aghast hearing that from promotional guys. What the hell does Resident Evil have to do with CoD?! It seems like developers have regained their sanity in recent years.
It's true. Japanese games only have cute & sexy waifus to be proud of while Western's Ubishit open world games can still boast about their empty but beautiful world and advanced graphics. Most of Jpanese games are outdated, shoddily-made, & overpriced. They don't deserve that $60 price tag.
>Inb4 graphicfag
This just means video games are dead in general, if all there is to praise is garbage like gwaphix and whyfoos.
I don't know what the hell you were even trying to say with this post.
>"We want CoD audience!!"
grim
Inafune does not play games. Just watch his "Mario Maker" shit. Total cluelessness for gameplay. He's an artist turned businessman and that's how he sees games. Just money making schemes. As such he wanted to chase those western dollars and leave the sinking ship of Nippon games.
capcom and nintendo? what?
t. pc gamer
When Sony moved the industry to AAA cinematic experiences, they've annihilated the entire market that was between indie tier no budget games and overblown mass marketing bullshit.
Japan was always best at small budget experimental games but these days it is a miracle if these can still get a budget. The riceloli game is a recent rare example.
Inafune is a hack who rode on everyone else's coattails and this "advice" he gave in 2008 nearly killed Capcom as a company; they only recovered when they stopped following his shitty advice.
Je unironically was right in 2009. Japan had lost back then. But they’ve been back on top for the last 5 or so years.
MHW / RE remakes + Cemu / Yuzu
Japanese game development struggled with the transition to HD games. They didn’t have the resources / manpower / ability to scale. So their releases during much of the PS3 era were often troubled. This was mostly sorted out by the time of the PS4.
Nintendo is doing very well in both HW and SW sales and dominated top sales charts.
It's ridiuclous that Sony killed Japan studios and didn't see the worth in them. It's totally a decision by people who don't play or value video games. I can totally get a studio like Clover being closed down since they lost money, but Japane studios made money!
Wow, it's almost like there are regular fluctuations in which market is the dominant one in video games since the days of the Atari
As Elon Musk said, woke bad.
Catering to the loud minorities that don't play the game, is a bad move.
Inafune is a hack who thinks games need to sell like GTAV or CoD to be sucessful and to achieve that they must stop what they are doing and bend backwards to appeal to mass market.
Guess what, MH World and Elden Ring both stayed true to their roots and managed to hit those CoD numbers anyway.
in 2014 western games went woke which lead to a massive decline in quality
Jesus christ this game
youtu.be
>pc retard knows nothing about the industry
can't say i'm surprised in the slightest
Why Yea Forums always ignore mobile games? Japan isn't dominating those and it's a bigger market than consoles games. Gacha is the only thing they make, and outside of Japan it doesn't sell very well
I mentioned it in the last thread that talked about this but i felt like these westaboos were feeling justified at the time due to the 7th gen games and the unprecedented amount of profit they brought for just a handful of games. Call of Duty games since 4 were breaking sale records every year, Halo 3 and Reach as well, Gears of War being a best seller new IP, GTA 4 and 5 that made themselves as one of the most profitable entertainment property launch of all time, all that shit certainly blew execs minds i think and Japs were no exception trying to follow those and think to themselves that they're being left behind and trying to follow suit.
Demon's Souls and Monster Hunter (ps2) even play and look kinda similar. Theyr'e very stripped down games without tons of cutscenes or story and focus just on gameplay and exploration. They're very traditional video games in that sense. While Inafune was saying his stupid things, both series were off on their own building huge fanbases slowly.
World stayed true to its roots?
The game became completely focused on a story that insisted so hard on it self that you were not allowed to skip the lengthy cutscenes or progress through the game by playing co-op in the multiplayer hub.
No, you had to go through the single player experience to see new monsters, and you had to stay on the rails.
>Dominating
>Most are now near the red
lol
I think Sony has now moved on from cinematic games to games as a service judging by their current financial decision.
They've gone full retard now and will just do whatever Californian managers think is the best strategy, which may very well be that.
Has this ever been true? Looking at the best selling games list ever made 50% of the games are Nintendo titles
The Wii U happened.
What the fuck I don't remember Ace Combat making me want to gouge my eyes out.
Yeah but that was in 2012
Yeah Nintendo, and who were once literally on top with Super Mario bros. with its bundles has been surpassed by multiple games.
The profitability of Japan Studios was just the public ruse.
Japan Studios had been pushing back against the company line that SIE HQ in California had set; even going sofar as to literally state in interviews that the studio knows what gamers actually want, while the suits in the US don't - and that the studio would continue on its own path for as long as it could, since THAT actually works.
It's a Charlie Sheen:
Tell your boss to fuck off, and you're getting fired no matter what.
America good Japan bad
>It was also the era of "We want CoD audience!!" which ruined countless franchises.
Can you name even 5?
Basically this. Video games became impossible budgets
It's that they don't fit into Sony California's "vision". You have these games that sell a bit, but they're not mega-huge blockbusters. Sony California sees them as a waste of resources that should be used on mega-blockbusters. Reminder that the suits don't play video games or see them as art form or creativity at all. Like Gravity Rush is a genuinely creative game that does something new and interesting with video game format.
Most games are hallway simulators, or giant open fields. Just flat flat flat.
>made money
What are you talking about? They were making flop after flop.
>even going sofar as to literally state in interviews that the studio knows what gamers actually want, while the suits in the US don't - and that the studio would continue on its own path for as long as it could, since THAT actually works.
Got a link to that interview?
Dragon Age/Mass Effect
Devil May Cry
Bionic Commando
Medal of Honor
Hitman
Tomb Raider
forgot Resident Evil
Shart Enix has their own Inafune making Forspoken.
Yeah, we're going to be feeling the results of Genshin Impact's runaway success for years to come. AAA GaaS titles are going to be the big thing this gen and it's going to suck ass.
Fucking Bomberman.
Geshin Impact didn't start the trend of AAA service games retard. That's been an evolving trend since 2012-2014 with shit like Destiny codifying it.
It's not hard to see why he thought that. The reality is that Japan enjoyed dominance in the video game industry from the Third Generation of Consoles all to way through the Sixth, and then all of a sudden, completely outta nowhere, they were falling behind. WAY fucking behind. So losing faith in the Japanese game industry at the time would have been understandable. I mean how the fuck would YOU feel if you were at the top of the world for two decades and suddenly started falling into the gutter with seemingly no end in sight?
Japan Studios were making games that made profit. Just not ENOUGH profit to impress Sony.
At the time, that was a common viewpoint, and frankly given the rut Japanese game devs were in it was a somewhat understandable one. It isn’t really fair to single out Inafune.
>Shart Enix has their own Inafune making Forspoken.
Shocked that was a SE game, as it looks nothing like the pretty boys they typically make. It looks both realistic and generic, so it doesn't stand out from the crowd.
Nomura's making Forspoken?
Inafune never had faith, and always liked western media and America more.
Add FEAR, Dead Space and fucking Ace Combat.
Maybe so, but even so it's an understandable sentiment for what was going on at the time.
normies couldnt predict western countries going totally insane
That looked really cool for about 30 seconds, but it just kept going and going.
He might have been very very wrong but this is a great piece of advice
Even if you are not losing, humility is always an admirable quality
>normies couldnt predict western countries going totally insane
Kinda funny that "boy media" is now almost impossible for corporations to make now. They have ham-strung themselves with so many diversity rules for content and developers, you have at least half the people who actively HATE the concept of "boy media" and want to undermine it and change it to something else.
>Even if you are not losing, humility is always an admirable quality
Inafune is everything but humble. Every bomb that he produced, he defended it and said it was perfect.
Resident Evil was hit hard, with shooter spin off games.
ITT: Cancel culture in action.
Make no mistake, my friends. Keiji Inafune is a victim of cancel culture.
Inafune's problem was that he was getting his proyects shut down at every turn, you can see what happened with MML3. Once he was gone there was nobody left fighting to allocate resources to it because megamen werent doing SFIV sales.
Splinter Cell comes to mind.
Japanese games were unironically dying at that time up until like 2016ish because all the big name companies and old beloved series decided to try and cash in on the then current trends of making everything linear and cinematic and trying to cater to a much larger audience. That shit nearly killed a ton of series and completely murdered the goodwill of like every single fanbase.