I love my wife, I just don't care about her.
Yeah, that's apt.
Yeah, I dare say we're in a renaissance of JP games.
Yeah, it's not bad lately. The end of last gen and beginning of this one was pretty rough, though. Unless you were playing visual novels and NIS junk, 3DS and a handful of games on Wii U were pretty much all we could subsist on.
But let's not lose sight of just how good it used to be. As good as the named games are, they reach back to February. We'd see as many games of as high a calibur in a month regularly back in the late '90s and early '00s.
Take a look at any given six week period back then. Third Strike, JGR, Shenmue, CvS1, Skies of Arcadia, Cannon Spike, Samba de Amigo, and Gunbird 2 all came out in the US beteeen Oct 4 and Nov 17 of 2000.
That was one console. Also, every game named in defense of the renaissance (Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Persona 5, Splatoon 2, Nier Automata, Breath of the Wild) is a sequel or remake. Five of the seven named Oct-to-mid-Nov 2000 DC games are new IPs.
It was bonkers. I thought it was going to be like that forever.
Last edited by A Robot Bit Me; 22 Aug 2017 at 09:56 AM.
That's not all Japanese specific though. Development costs and cycles have exploded, so each developer can't produce anywhere near as much as they used to be able to.
I take your point, though most of those games weren't cheap, either. Shenmue had the biggest development cost of all time, and SoA and JGR were AAA. All three were developed and published by the same company. All three came out in the same two weeks (Oct 30 - Nov 13, 2000).
Today, that seems insane. Back then, it was Tuesday.
Things are good right now, but we're never getting that back.
Last edited by A Robot Bit Me; 22 Aug 2017 at 10:04 AM.
I agree with your underlying point.
Sega had and has several studios though. It's not like AM2 was working on JGR while they were making Shenmue.
And the six week period was on a failed console that had the plug pulled a couple of months later.
The Japanese game industry is tiny though. I don't think it has the horses to keep up with guys like EA spending $150M for a game that sells 20M copies. There's a few exceptions like Nintendo and Square but it's easy to see how Capcom for example has struggled.
For sure, though that may be a chicken and egg discussion. I wonder if EA was any bigger than Capcom in the 90s. It was likely Capcom's failure to maintain momentum that has at least contributed to that gap.
I think the Xbox 360 really changed things. It brought a lot of American teams that were focused on PC before that. And with that came more money but also a shift in gamer tastes towards games that Japanese developers weren't really making. Compare the top sellers on PS2 and PS3, once you get past GTA and GT it's almost totally different worlds.
Example - Lost Odyssey was a wonderful title and on PS2 it probably would have been a top seller. On 360 it was more of a cult hit.
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