The era of the Japanese console games industry is coming to an end. There are fewer and fewer developers in this market who create successful projects,” says Yoshiki Okamoto, founder of Game Republic. Everyone goes into mobile development.
Okamoto, who has worked on such series as Street Fighter and Resident Evil, said that today it is extremely difficult for a Japanese developer to create a console blockbuster that will sell a decent circulation around the world.
There are many reasons for this: this is the slowdown in the growth of the console market, the growth of budgets, the crisis of ideas, and the desire of the Japanese to please the American market, which led to the loss of originality of a number of projects, and then the ethnic component.
So at the moment, Okamoto, like many in his situation, has started developing mobile games, trying to get away from the big budgets and big teams needed to create modern console projects. According to him, modern mobile game development companies can be quite small, numbering literally a few people, as it was at the dawn of the console gaming industry.
And largely due to this, the mobile segment is extremely important for a large number of developers in Japan today. Often only here they can earn. Moreover, it is very significant: the revenues received from the mobile market allowed Gree and DeNA not only to become one of the world’s largest companies, but also to begin expansion to the west.
Given all this, it can be assumed that a mass exodus of Japanese developers from the console industry to the mobile industry is not far off. It, in turn, will entail an increase in the number of Japanese projects on the market.