Konami producer Tak Fujii was recently asked by Siliconera to explain why there weren’t very many Konami titles coming to the US. Here’s his response:
It’s hard. As you know, the industry has changed. It’s a totally different business here compared to five years ago. This is my personal guess, but many Western gamers don’t play Japanese games anymore or maybe they never played Japanese games. They have no interest in Japanese games.
…OK, there is a big FPS franchise in the West, the biggest one from somewhere. It has massive numbers. Maybe half or more than half of those players may have bought hardware just to play that game and no other games. They only have one game and they keep purchasing downloadable maps, additional content, DLC, DLC, DLC. And then a new one comes out and they just buy it. They never play sports games, action games, and have no interest in Japanese games.
Before Microsoft came into the console business, the center of development was Nintendo or Sony. It was very handy for us to discuss hardware and technology with them because everything was in Japanese. Now, reports have to go through the American division and are translated into Japanese for the technical division and then if anything comes back we have to translate that into English for support. It’s hard. Once America started getting into the console business, there is only English support and they are in the Western market. It was handy for them and so the roles changed.
I think that the issue here is only partly what Tak Fujii has pinpointed and mostly an issue of cultural mismatching. Let me explain further:
What most people don’t realize is that video games were developed by American university Computer Science departments. At the time the computers required to create these games filled massive rooms, so there wasn’t a lot of market for it then. As video games became a real and marketable technology, those students who had worked on them in school began turning them into arcade machines. These arcade machines essentially birthed what we know as video games today.
The Japanese entered the video game market in the 1980s, well after their development. They were successful because there wasn’t a lot of narrative in those early games, so Japanese titles did well in the US because the gameplay was fun. This continued until the release of the PlayStation 2.
As hardware made it possible to do a lot more in games, gamers were being subjected to a lot more narrative. The more that Japanese developers expanded their games to fill this new world of games the more it was obvious that there were some serious culture gaps. The first major title to make this shift was Metal Gear Solid 2. The first Metal Gear had more narrative than almost any game (not an RPG) up to that point, and it was fairly tame in terms of weirdness. But, when Metal Gear Solid 2 released it was chocked full of strange Japanese imagery, odd story telling twists, and all this without any explanation for the western gamer.
Now we’re forced to swallow Japanese games that only a Japanese teenager could understand. Games like Nier, Final Fantasy XIII, each successive Resident Evil, and Blue Dragon just to name a few (I’m generalizing by the way. Most people who watch Anime and have been playing games for a long time don’t have too much problem with these games). With these games releasing along with a slew of American titles more catered to the Western culture, there’s no question why American gamers moved away from Japanese titles.
With this switch, Japanese developers are ignoring western gamers, catering even more to the Japanese culture. I think that the reality is that Japan doesn’t hold the market for good games anymore, and we’re seeing a need for more culturally specific games for each demographic.