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Hideki Kamiya shits all over Kotaku
- Thread starter jett
- Start date
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Exactly. It really shows the pervasiveness of the double-standards this recent generation.
Except the instances where it's about individual Japanese companies, and not Japan as a whole. Which is most of the time. And there's as many, if not more articles criticizing the game industry in its entirety.
Then again, if we saw American or European companies losing a ton of marketshare, then we probably would get articles examining why it might be happening to those regions.
Agent Unknown
Member
So he did get in a bit of trouble with Inaba over Gaijin-gate? What'd the tweet say?
Certainly not most-of-the-time enough.
Yeah, and it's made Japanese developers be unnecessarily hard on themselves and stray away from the kind of games Japan is known for. I can really only think of a few developer that have shrugged these criticisms off and made the games they wanted to. (FromSoft mainly).
Still my favorite Kamiya tweet:
This is too awesome.
http://www.1up.com/news/resident-evil-bayonetta-creator-brush
Heres an example of unprovoked Kamiya.
Heres an example of unprovoked Kamiya.
indigo-cyclops
Member
That explains it then, I don't read every single tweet so I don't know the ins and outs of his responses.
Well, there's the fact Japan is the only 1st world nation that doesn't buy or develop games for the PC platform? It's big in the west, it's big in Korea and China, but Japan in unique in it's indifference. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's hardly controversial to point that out and wonder why one country that is so big on games doesn't care for arguably the biggest gaming platform.
Alright, instead of posting all the articles, you just post just one? For me to read. One article that inaccurately paints the entire Japanese game industry with a broad brush. I'm genuinely curious as to how I missed something which is evidently happening so often.
But...but all those visual novels T_T ...
It's controversial if you call them "clueless" and act like it's impossible to choose to play games on something else, instead of being uninformed. Kotaku implies that anyone not being interested in Valve is an alien concept to anyone in the west, and is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.
The very same day, they wrote articles about the SteamBox. What is the SteamBox? It's Valve launching a streamlined PC in the west for people who aren't interested in PCs and prefer a more streamlined console experience. Hell, even Totilo himself wrote about 2012 being the year he finally got interested in PC gaming again, meaning he wasn't for a long time before this year.
The article was definitely controversial, and insulting to Kamiya. The article is also offensive to all Japanese when placed in the context of Kotaku's larger coverage of their gaming studios, and culture as a whole. They changed the headline, so even Kotaku thought it was controversial, eventually.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
Why do you think the PC became so big in the west? Because that's where western developers made their best games after the '83 video game crash. The NES, Master System, Genesis (Mega-Drive), SNES, Saturn, PlayStation, N64, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube... most of the western efforts on these systems were pretty bad. These were all systems from Japanese hardware manufacturers and were heavily supported by Japanese developers. These were the platforms where all of the games were for Japanese players. That's why PC gaming didn't become popular in Japan.
Meanwhile, western developers put their best efforts out on the PC from 1983 until 2002 or so when the original Xbox launched. That's why the PC platform is so huge over here. It wasn't even until the Xbox 360 came out that most of the big western developers fully shifted gears to console development. Coinciding with that we saw a huge drop in popularity with the PC in the west. Support for the PC from 2005 - 2009 or so was comparatively quite shitty.
So, no. There's nothing strange about Japan's lack of PC support. For the longest time, Japanese consumers were more likely to have some kind of console in their home than a personal computer that could play video games. All of the support for games was on consoles.
Presumably because Plunkett did not write the article (Eisenbeis did), nor did he publish it (that would have been Totilo)?
Personally, I'd rather see a much more in-depth article on the subject than what was presented, but I'm glad at least a few points were touched on. Recently, I was gifted Dark Souls, and, when playing it, was all "woah, this is a shitty port." Then I started thinking about how nearly every Japanese PC port is atrocious, and began wondering why this was the case. The article hit shortly after I began thinking about this, and offered some basic explanations for why Japan seems less friendly towards gaming's finest platform than Europe or America.
In my ideal world, someone writes ten or twenty thousand words exploring the history of PC gaming around the world, and the way that the various European (Swedes/Poles/Germans/Brits, particularly), American, and Japanese gaming cultures have all handled it. I actually might do one myself, but I wouldn't have any idea where to begin, or how to go about contacting a bunch of developers for quotes.
Most of the people who have criticized the article have done so because of the way it apparently hurts Kamiya, which it really doesn't (especially post title change). It's a light, fluffy piece that offers some insights into why the Japanese market doesn't seem too ready to adopt Steam/PC gaming, not some super lengthy Atlantic article breaking down. It had the misfortune of a poor headline that misrepresented both Kamiya and the content of the article. That's now been fixed. Kamiya's public tweets were mostly just a springboard for answering a basic question: "why doesn't Japan seem very open towards PC gaming and Steam?"
Sure, you might say "oh, well, actually, Japanese culture doesn't treat digital media/cloud stuff the way it's presented in the article," and you might be right. The article's author currently lives in Tokyo, so I presume he has a relatively healthy understanding of the subject, and see no reason to doubt his claims. You might choose to take issue with the idea that bad localization is the problem, and, again, you might be right (but, as Gabe Newell has mentioned before, when they switched to better localization in certain countries, sales increased, so this line of reasoning seems logical enough).
Do I wish it was more in-depth? Sure. As you've pointed out, the console crash greatly affected the way PC development grew in the US (and, presumably, Europe). Then again, PC developers had been making games for different audiences (adults, often tech-oriented ones who owned computers) since the early 80s--games like Flight Simulator and Ultima. So maybe your argument doesn't totally stand up. I dunno. Whatever the case may be, discussing this--and whether the article should have covered it--is definitely worth discussing.
Nobody here is trying to make Kamiya look bad, and that's the biggest argument people have presented, as well as the one I take issue with. "Oh, this article says he's clueless--this is the worst article ever."
I have a migraine so Ima go to bed now.
Well yes, that's why I called it a dumb headline and twitter exchange. Though, the idea of a major game developer being completely indifferent to the PC is an alien concept, at least in the west, where there are almost no game major developers that hold the same stance.
True, true, market support does provoke demand. Though I'd say western game development ramped up on consoles earlier than that, in the early to mid-90s. That was when annual sports games started to become big and Midway started rivaling Capcom in arcade productions.
Why have most western developers been totally indifferent to dedicated handhelds? Are they clueless?
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
That's because every major western game developer got their start on the PC.
InternHertz
Member
Zoe
Member
But he's not completely indifferent.
Right. Somehow this didn't make it into Kotaku's article. Seems they're pretty "clueless" about Platinum Games.
Bayonetta 2 studio Platinum Games wants to work on Nintendo 3DS, PC next
September 25, 2012 By Anthony John Agnello
Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba discussed his studio’s future after Bayonetta 2 in a new interview, citing Steam and 3DS as his destinations.
I realize you're probably being sarcastic, but I did want to point out that most handheld gaming happens while commuting, and public transit in the West is far less common than it is in Japan, hence its lack of adoption.
Oh, come the fuck on.
The article wasn't about Platinum. It wasn't saying that Kamiya was clueless, it wasn't saying that Inaba was clueless, and it wasn't saying that Platinum was clueless. The headline--which has been changed after rightful criticism--did, but not the article.
All it did was use tweets from a popular Japanese designer as a springboard for explanation as to why PC gaming isn't that popular in Japan.
Sidebar: Whenever I see someone talking about how Western developers don't care about 3DS or Vita and therefore doomed, I wonder if it was written by someone who has never seen a handheld library.
I wasn't being sarcastic. Flip that around for Japan's perspective and tell me how portable gaming PCs are compared to handhelds, especially on a cramped series of islands where small devices are valued more than bulky machines.
The other factor is just sales numbers. Handhelds don't sell that well in the west right now, though even when they did, the west basically ignored any significant investment in the platforms. Flip that around for Japan's perspective. PC games don't sell at all in Japan, so they haven't developed for it.
You don't think it was worth a mention though? The head of Kamiya's studio just said they're going to start focusing on Steam mere months ago.
Agent Unknown
Member
Uh oh.
Kamiya offered me some candy after I showed him one of my Gradius figures:
https://mobile.twitter.com/pg_kamiya/status/278663583448064002
Phonomezer
Banned
Why are people still trying to sell him on Steam and "Gabe". It's creepy.
Typographenia
Member
This is the most positive interpretation of the situation I've seen.
Huh? Other than their shameful promotional "documentary", Polygon has been pretty great since launch. Or at least I haven't seen anything even close to a Kotaku level of insincerity and disingenuousness.
Still my favorite Kamiya tweet:
one god is naturally attracted to another
You're ignoring the point and just switching around some names to correct my error. Why didn't the writer and editor contact the person whose tweets they pulled for prep/research of this article. We're talking about twitter, not some guy on an island who scribbled some notes in a bottle.
it took a little while, but kotaku defenders are now at a grand total of 4!
But this isn't true at all. There are a ton of handheld games made by big-name western developers and publishers. Not to mention the endless sea of iOS games. The only handheld that isn't selling well right now in the Vita, and those sales are pretty flat in Japan too. I'm looking at the Vita's launch lineup, and half the games were produced by western studios, which is a far cry from "basically ignored any significant investment"
FlashbladeGAF
Member
gone for awhile but I come back to see the conversation cycle back to the content(or lack there) of the Kotaku artic-blog
post numbers keep rising
Like you said it yourself, you can say a lot of things and make people look bad if thats what they want, especially if that leads to more clicks, making Kamiya a representative of Japanese developers (not just the apathic ones), making shit up about the MP3 vs CD thing, stablishing that Japanese gamers dont play Diablo III therefore they must dont play much on their PCs, misinterpreting the "cloud" comment, which is not even close to what Steam offers is incredibily misleading and the old title just set the tone for the rest of the article, which I assume remains mainly unchanged.
I get that many of you guys love the man, and instantly hate anything that makes him look bad (), but come on. A little moderation would be nice. What we should have had were a bunch of comments condemning Kotaku for a sensationalist headline that diminishes the content within. Instead, we've got a bunch of people just shitting all over Kotaku for very little good reason.except, for some reason, his games.
The last game I played made by him was VJ1 back in the gamecube era and while im looking forward to the Wonderful 101, it doesnt affect my ability to point out when a person that makes stuff I like is an ass (ie Alex Ward). Kamiya's response lacked tact and I understand why people might have scalated it to claims of racism, but the article (new title or not) is still slanderous and inaccurate, it is simply wrong.
Edit:
That is an incredibly dismissive way to see this.
Because Japan loves mobile gaming. I feel like I might be wrong but think of it this way:
If you go to work all day on your computer, do you want to come home and play on your computer? For a lot of people, they travel a lot, so they enjoy little snippets of gaming on their phone or ds because of public transportation. Here in america, we're way too spread out and we drive ourselves usually. Can't exactly play angry birds while driving can you?
Then there's the other thing Kamiya said:
"Personally I don't like cloud thing, cuz it seems kinda unstable to me. Just personally." which is basically "I don't know or am unfamiliar with this product, so I am apprehensive about it" even though outside of japan these services are absurdly abundant and popular.
Or "Many publishers don't view PC as an important platform." Well yes, many publishers wouldn't....because they don't develop for it in the first place. Really the only games that seem to come from the japanese pc market are bullethell games and visual and erotic novels. If they aren't this, then they're things like Ys or recettear. To make matters worse, the games like Ys or Recettear are games that are very popular on the PC but until recently were never released in english because they didn't know if it would be profitable. Yet here they are, selling extremely well. The market for RPGs has almost no competition and they stand to make quite some money for example, but you never make money without spending some money and effort.
I hope, and it seems like they're coming around, with the success of Dark Souls that more japanese devs will wake up and go "hey, this will make us money! Lets stop ignoring the PC community worldwide"
Doujin games in general go on PC, not bullet hell games. Commercial bullet hell games are arcade/console only.
They're very popular if we're talking about stuff like Netflix or music streaming sites, but they're not popular in regards to gaming; yet. And you have to remember that Kamiya likes to make action games and prefers 60 FPS, so he'd probably look unfavorably on lag.
I'm not from Japan and I feel the same way about cloud gaming. I don't have On Live, despite all the articles out there claiming it's the future. I want to own my games physically. I live in Kansas, not Japan.
Anyone with bandwidth caps would feel the same way, or anyone living in a rural area without highspeed internet, or anyone who likes to collect games. It's not at all a uniquely Japanese phenomenon to have a few reservations about cloud gaming. He even went out of his way to say it was just his personal opinion at the end. They took that and spun it into a representation of all of Japan. I can see how he would get annoyed.
D
Deleted member 20920
Unconfirmed Member
And this is precisely why that article was horrid to begin with. How can you use the tweets to springboard that article when the tweets are insufficient information? The tweets don't tell us anything about what the Japanese industry is like. Using that as a spring board to write their article, which is based on anecdotal evidence, makes it seem like they're using Kamiya as a representative of Japan. It wasd almost like the article was written already and they felt like they needed someone's quote to make it 'work'. So they just took Kamiya's rather flippant tweet and used it as if they've actually asked him about the issue in depth.
I have posted some of my thoughts earlier about why i felt that the article was bad.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46235387&postcount=1206
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46242491&postcount=1454
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46243196&postcount=1461
As for Kamiya, I think his anger is justified(if he really is that angry to begin with, I think he is mostly just trolling trolls) and that he wasn't being xenophobic. And i am not a Kamiya fan. I have not played Bayonetta and have only tried bits of DMC 2 and 3 and Okami. The only game that he was heavily involved in that i had finished and liked was RE2.
I'm an expert.As I said, I might be wrong. Bullet hell games are not something I know the complete background on
Are they really? The main representative of "Cloud" that I know of is Onlive, maybe Quake LIVe and the Square-Enix service. If by "Cloud" Kamiya meant cloud gaming then he might have a point, but we dont know if Kamiya mixed up the terms and it meant Steam, we simply are not sure, but that didnt stop the writer from assuming what he meant.
Interestingly though, Japan's internet is more like europe's and not the north americas or south americas (which has tons of caps on ISP services, mostly through rising internet use on aging hardware).
Take into consideration: the SNES for a while had something that was moderately popular that is akin to what WiiU users have now with miiverse iirc. Had they released the same service in europe or USA, it would not have worked because at the time dial up was a luxury and most families didn't have it or could afford it. I remember as a kid how simply being able to login to the internet with a sub-56k modem in say like...1999? was something truly amazing.
It seemed to me like he was talking about cloud services, not cloud saving or cloud gaming.
Duh, thats why Pizzaroll is the expert!
Son of Cervantes
Member
This may be a silly question, but does someone like Richard Eisenbeis get paid by Kotaku for his postings? And if so, how much? I ask because nothing he's posted seems to be anything particularly special - many TV anime and movie reviews, some opinion pieces (like the very bad Kamiya article which essentially gives the Japanese developer perspective on PC gaming based on some casual tweets with very little else to substantiate the points he is arguing). It seems like anyone who lives in Japan and has a working TV set could do what Eisenbeis does, unlike, say, Ashcraft's articles which, while sometimes silly and insubstantial, seem to have a bit more meat to them in terms of research, sourcing, etc.
I guess what I'm asking is, does Eisenbeis Live off his Kotaku earnings or is this just a part-time gig for him?
I guess what I'm asking is, does Eisenbeis Live off his Kotaku earnings or is this just a part-time gig for him?
I haven't read much of his Kotaku stuff but he's also been on Kat Bailey's RPG podcast. I think last time he was on he was talking about how he liked Project x Zone and how great Toki to Towa was. More often than not I find my-self disagreeing with him so it'd be unsurprising to me if I wouldn't like these opinion pieces either, especially after seeing this rather distasteful one. I try to avoid his stuff, but I enjoy Kat's podcast otherwise so I still listen to it. Maybe I'll just skip his segments if he returns for another episode. I doubt he's doing any of this full time though.
Wow, I never saw that story.
If he wrote that all himself, that's pretty impressive. Seems like it'd belong on a proper blog rather than Twitter, though. Guess he just likes the attention.
The bit about the boot is pretty stupid, but pretty hardcore. "Living hell"...
I doubt anyone producing content for Kotaku does it for free.
He probably isn't being paid *that* much for this particular post, though.
Riposte
Member
What? No one gets paid for making posts on GAF.
He does some blogging on platinum's facebook I believe. Or he used to at least.
Did I out myself as what's-his-face's damage control GAF account?
Oopsie-doodle
Anything Kamiya writes for the Platinum Games blog would be written in Japanese and then translated into English.
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