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[Night_Trekker]

I read the entire thing. Man, big respect gain for Inafune in my book. I don't think he's as naive as some of the posters in this thread believe, either.

By the way, I wanted to pull out this quote:

as being of particular interest. If there's anything I've noticed about the Japanese industry, it's that the majority of development there is happening at the same companies as ten or even twenty years ago, often with the same 40-year old producers managing teams and directing titles.

Interestingly, Goichi Suda bemoaned this situation a while back in an interview. One of the reasons I love Grasshopper so much.

This is something I wish all publishers and developers would have drilled into their heads. Standards have risen for games and people have more entertainment options than ever now. I don't have the time or interest for merely competent games. The amount of mediocrity that is lavished with huge budgets blows my mind.

What's funny is I have more time for merely competent games that do something different, interesting and creative, more time than I do for by-the-numbers blockbusters with tons of polish. Are we saying the same thing here or not? I can't decide.

 

[luffeN]

Just read the first post. First of all thank you Chessemeister! And second of all wow, I really like the interviewer. I don't know what it is but it reads like the guy is a real pro or something like that xD

 

[Rahul]

Fucking fantastic job and great read, thanks a lot!

 

[oldschoolpinball]

This is one hell of a fantastic interview. Thanks op for tKing the time to translate it. Really makes you think how and why developers who move to the board room lose that drive that led them to the board room in the first place

 

[Nolan.]

He really knows his stuff it seems and raises so many key points. Not just that but suddenly a lot of the movements concerning various Japanese companies make so much more sense, I think my dream of true sequels to certain games just died. Anyway thanks cheesemeister that was a really interesting read.

 

[faridmon]

Even though this is what he is feeling, i have to be sceptic about the real reason he left there. They must saw the doom of the company is coming and talked him into leaving and then thats what he left.

I mean, if Yoshinori Ono is happy about the state of Capcom, I don't see why would Inafune complain. He probably saw glimpse of western devs. and imagines them in better state.

Yes, the salary based income Japaanese economy employ suck, but thats intrinsic to the whole country rather than pointing the finger on Capcom.

I am glad he left, as I thought he was the weakness of that Company, I hope he finds other Devs that suits him, but Capcom and him, clearly, don't have the same philosophy.

 

[Gavarms]

As has been said before, but can not be repeated enough, I would like to thank Cheesemeister for all the work he did on this. Really interesting read

 

[Naked Prime]

Great read and thanks again Cheesemeister

While he makes some really good points, my inital thoughts are that he seems very contradictory at times. But I guess I can say I gained a little respect for him. But it seems it all boiled down to; he couldn't take the heat so he got the fuck out of the kitchen. Best of luck to him, but he needs to cut out that contracting out development idea. While it adds up on paper, people get screwed on & over at jobs.

 

[Zeouterlimits]

Another thank you to the OP, amazing read.
Such refreshing honesty, it's nice just to hear devs "spew" sometimes.

 

[Cosmonaut X]

It doesn't necessarily have to be an investment at all, though. I'm not talking about creating new divisions, I'm just saying they should grant existing ones a clearer identity. The publisher just needs to allow their teams a moniker and a logo before the title screen to help better personify them, instead of simply saying Presented by [Publisher] as a catch-all for everything that publisher does, and making consumers have to do detective work to find out which one of the oh-so-memorably-named R&D1 through R&D6 was actually responsible. You know the old adage about people not wanting to be treated like numbers? Well...

It might just be a token offering, but I really think making employees feel like part of a more exclusive and impressive-sounding club than "[Publisher] R&D[number]" is a great motivator for them to make a better product, to make their little corner of the company stand out against the others and feel like 'theirs.'

I think it depends on the parent organisation and how they're rewarded within the company.

Using your examples - there seems to be a great deal of pride within Nintendo simply at being part of the company and doing things with a "Nintendo touch", and staff seem to float from team to team depending on need and expertise, so calling Software Development Group No. 4 something like Triforce would be unnecessary.

However, outside of this core Nintendo seem happy to let studios preserve a more independent identity - like Retro or Intelligent Systems.

I think Capcom's decision to rename Blue Castle Games to Capcom Games Vancouver was mistaken though - certainly, if I was an employee there I wouldn't be feeling any pride in being lumped under such an anonymous name.

 

[MisterHero]

I actually kind of understand his position that Western games appear to have more "passion" to their creation (even FPS #500 can be as well-made and as high production as any other title), but motivating their workers by maintaining a culture where layoffs are common is the absolute worst method that currently exists.

Overall, that alone makes me disagree with him, but reading the entire interview (._.), I really have to respect it.

 

[duron256]

Thanks OP for the translation (must have taken a long time considering the time it took to finish reading it)

 

[djtiesto]

Really awesome for you to take the time to translate it. While I don't necessarily agree with Inafune on everything (especially his western game development mentality which really seems like a case of "grass is greener"), he brings up many legitimate problems within the Japanese game industry. An aging workforce, an aging population in general, and a high barrier of entry for indie devs will stifle the creativity the Japanese game industry needs to grow.

 

[charlequin]

It doesn't necessarily have to be an investment at all, though. I'm not talking about creating new divisions, I'm just saying they should grant existing ones a clearer identity.

Giving teams the opportunity to work on new IPs and/or other types of unusual or surprising projects is an investment: you're accepting a near-guaranteed lower average return on each individual title in order to also potentially produce the extremely valuable new franchises of the future. Almost every publisher in the industry has decided that this trade-off isn't worth it and that's part of why internal development teams are treated as so disposable or fungible these days -- if they're just all cogs in a sequel-making machine there's not much benefit to giving them their own identity or pride in their work.

What's funny is I have more time for merely competent games that do something different, interesting and creative, more time than I do for by-the-numbers blockbusters with tons of polish.

A lot of the trouble here comes down to marketing and presentation, as well as related factors like pricing, I think. It's pretty well demonstrated, I would say, that gamers aren't just interested in sequels and regurgitated content -- there's a huge, insatiable desire for interesting and new ideas, or unexpected syntheses, or clever reinterpretations of old standards. But the industry has largely managed to grind out the expectation that such things will appear in standard packaged games, and made the default package for "a game" something that's much too big and expensive for most clever and unexpected ideas of that sort.

The result we've seen is that innovative and new games are flourishing, but big publishers aren't reaping most of the rewards.

 

[sn00zer]

kinda interesting that all his talk about how awesome the western-side of things were he was talking more about the industry itself not the games

 

[Cosmonaut X]

Giving teams the opportunity to work on new IPs and/or other types of unusual or surprising projects is an investment: you're accepting a near-guaranteed lower average return on each individual title in order to also potentially produce the extremely valuable new franchises of the future. Almost every publisher in the industry has decided that this trade-off isn't worth it and that's part of why internal development teams are treated as so disposable or fungible these days -- if they're just all cogs in a sequel-making machine there's not much benefit to giving them their own identity or pride in their work.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but surely the ideal solution is to strike a balance with your internal resources - you have small teams working on experimental software, or on new IP/fresh approaches to existing franchises while the rest of your workforce keeps trundling away on turning out more bankable software.

You have to accept that your experimental stuff will take losses and you have to manage the two sides to keep those losses under control and keep money flowing in, but the payoff when you hit on a new, popular idea or franchise is immense.

EDIT:

Short version, I suppose - why have most publishers decided that the trade-off isn't worth it now? Is it the sheer cost and associated risk of modern "blockbuster" game development? A wider issue with risk and the current state of the economy? Shortsightedness (i.e., better to exploit what we already have for guaranteed (but limited) income than to risk on new development)?

 

[charlequin]

Short version, I suppose - why have most publishers decided that the trade-off isn't worth it now?

Because the industry poisoned the well for new IPs by pushing prices for hardware and software up out of take-a-chance range and pushed average budgets into unsustainable levels where it's very difficult for new IPs or unusual ideas to compete on a polish and content level with proven franchises.

New IPs launched on PS360 at $60 tank unless they fit within very narrow genre boundaries (and not so much even that anymore.) If these new IPs are built with lots of polish in order to match up with older successful franchises, they lose tens of millions of dollars when they do. So even though an inability to generate new brands and franchises is a guaranteed problem for publishers in the longish run, actually being able to generate that new content is too economically infeasible as long as they continue to focus on full-price PS360 retail titles as the "core" of development.

 

[Tiktaalik]

It seems like every other publishing industry (ie. Music/Movies) has indie sub labels and such but the video game industry still doesn't really have anything like that. The only thing that I feel is even somewhat similar is perhaps Sony's recent efforts to fund indie PSN games in exchange for exclusivity.

When EA announced Visceral Games with Dead Space I thought perhaps they were going to move toward a sort of "sub studio" style but since then they've said that all sorts of studios as far as Bejing and Montreal are "Visceral Games" so in effect they've just rebranded a bunch of cookie cutter EA studios to "Visceral Games" because Dead Space was popular.

 

[Tiktaalik]

I think what Inafune is glamorizing in the west is the west's startup culture, where people are adventurous, and comfortable with starting risky new companies. At least in Inafune's mind, this is not as present in Japan, perhaps due to the safety of lifetime employment. Inafune paints a picture of a Japanese game industry where salary men don't really care to what degree a product sells or not and simply want to do a "good enough" job.

In the west in contrast there is significantly more generation of small spinoff companies. Blue Castle for example, was founded by a couple of guys who put in some time at EA Canada and then decided to strike out on their own and do their own thing. Most cities with a large employer like EA in Vancouver or Ubisoft in Montreal have a bunch of smaller studios founded by people who worked at the large studios and gained a bunch of skills and then left to setup their own company.

There are lots of people that just want to build cool stuff and failure is not a big deal and is considered just a learning experience. For example before creating Twitter the founder started three businesses and they all failed, but he just kept making new companies. I think it's this sort of attitude that Inafune respects.

This sort of startup culture may have died out in Japans video game industry, but it may still exist in the web space. Japan's DeNA for example is a fast growing social games company that just bought ngmoco.

 

[Struct09]

Amazing read, really cool to get a high-profile developer's take on the industry

 

[Azih]

I don't think it's quite fair to say that Inafune is naive about Western development as he has a whole ton of experience with dealing with Western development houses and selling games in a Western market. In the interview he also made note of how Western developers can get fired in a moment's notice. I think he hates the stagnation of a lot of big Japanese publishers and the Western approach of developers being more independent of publishers and not having a salaryman culture generates a dynamism that he finds incredibly lacking in Capcom.

Plus it's interesting that he always seems to mention Dead Rising and Street Fighter 4 in the same breath and as coming from the same approach.

 

[Raging Spaniard]

Wanted to give a lot of credit also to the INTERVIEWER. He didnt have any of those questions prepared, was amazingly candid about his own industry, employer and magazine by admitting they need to do a much better job informing the audience. The fact that he had that situation just dropped on him and pulled a great 3 hr. interview out of his ass is pretty impressive.

 

[FlashbladeGAF]

Great read
Thanks for the translation!

Glad to finally get full explanations on Inafune's opinions on the Japanese industry instead of the hotheaded quotes that would make you believe Inafune has "abandoned" Japan

 

[Cheesemeister]

Wanted to give a lot of credit also to the INTERVIEWER. He didnt have any of those questions prepared, was amazingly candid about his own industry, employer and magazine by admitting they need to do a much better job informing the audience. The fact that he had that situation just dropped on him and pulled a great 3 hr. interview put of his ass is pretty impressive.

You can credit 4Gamer staffer Kazuhisa-san for conducting the interview.

 

[demosthenes]

Great read
Thanks for the translation!

Glad to finally get full explanations on Inafune's opinions on the Japanese industry instead of the hotheaded quotes that would make you believe Inafune has "abandoned" Japan

Yea, awesome interview, a lot of stuff in there at least to me makes me think: wtf.

The whole 700 employees on just 4 projects, is that normal? Seems crazy to me.

 

[Rentahamster]

Nice work on the translation. Pretty insightful interview, and not the usual fluff.

 

[storafötter]

I think it is pretty ridiculous him feeling that it is wrong that if people get payed when a game performs badly as they wont be as encouraged to commit or put as much effort into the project. However it is better to maintain the workers rights and comfort than please silly consumers. There is more to it than how a secure job makes you less willing to put your passion into it.

Nevertheless very interesting to read.

 

[sundrenched]

I think it is pretty ridiculous him feeling that it is wrong that if people get payed when a game performs badly as they wont be as encouraged to commit or put as much effort into the project. However it is better to maintain the workers rights and comfort than please silly consumers. There is more to it than how a secure job makes you less willing to put your passion into it.

Nevertheless very interesting to read.

but it does contribute something doesn't it, even on the subconscious level? It's the cycle of boom and bust that opens the room for so much growth. If there is true job stability, unless the company grows continously, places for promotions are incredibly limited and pay is relatively stagnant. Why try so hard for something that you can get by with little effort?

 

[nubbe]

Start a new company Rock Games / Lock Games / Right Games / Mega Games

 

[Prime Blue]

Start a new company Rock Games / Lock Games / Right Games / Light Games

Fixed.

 

[subversus]

It may be the first truly honest interview with a game developer I've read. Many thanks to the translator.

 

[storafötter]

but it does contribute something doesn't it, even on the subconscious level? It's the cycle of boom and bust that opens the room for so much growth. If there is true job stability, unless the company grows continously, places for promotions are incredibly limited and pay is relatively stagnant. Why try so hard for something that you can get by with little effort?

I believe in finding other alternatives, this model of punishment and promotion isnt a very solid system either. I could agree that getting promotion can be alright when the situation is right, but where the job is on the line and without getting pay I cannot go by at all.

 

[Alphazero]

Wow. That was honestly inspirational. Thanks Inafune-san.