Here's another article about the Japanese industry.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... ec8108446c
The PlayStation 4 launched in Japan on Saturday, three months after its arrival in the US and Europe. To veteran industry watchers, the delay speaks volumes about the decline of the Japanese games industry
The queues seemed to stretch forever along the crowded streets of Akihabara, Tokyo’s famed Electronic Town. Outside the biggest stores, scuffles broke out as gamers fought for favourable positions – the police were called in. It was chaos. This was March 2000, the launch of the PlayStation 2 console – the most successful games machine ever produced. The rest of the world would have to wait months for this, but back then the domestic market was the most important to Sony, as it had been to all major console manufacturers for twenty years. Japan was the epicentre of gaming; it had the console makers, the best developers and the biggest games. But over the course of the following decade things changed.
February 22, 2014. The PlayStation 4 is being launched in Japan three months after the machine’s high profile arrival in North America. There have been queues, of course, but no riot police this time, and no one is watching the sales figures for a hint of how this console may perform – it has already sold five million units elsewhere in the world. There are a couple of Japanese launch titles – gangster adventure Yakuza: Ishin and fantasy strategy sim Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends the key examples – but, apart from a new beta demo for Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn there is nothing huge. Talking about the delay, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, has said that the Japanese development industry wasn’t quite ready to support the machine, but this isn’t the whole story. It papers over something more profound. The country hasn’t been ready for years.
In 2002, Japan accounted for 50% of the global video game market. By 2010, it was at 10%. If you go back to the era of PlayStation 1 and 2, you will see it was dominated by Japanese giants like Nintendo, Sony, Capcom, Konami and Namco. The biggest games were arcade conversions – the likes of Tekken, Ridge Racer and Street Fighter – but the biggest console originals came from Japanese studios too: Super Mario, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid... These were the games everyone was excited by. The top ten best selling games of the nineties were all developed in Japan.
