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[Pyrrhus]

Platinum Games? Tango Gameworks? Atlus? Level-5? It's not like game developers are athletes or female pornstars (the older they get the worse they get). We're transcending from an era of super star game developers to...teams. Japanese developers will be fine...

The entire point of the article that everyone is refuting is that we're moving past the era of Superstar Japanese devs. So then you agree with Kohler's assessment?

Everyone keeps mentioning the old guard. The guys who made their names at Capcom or Konami or Squaresoft back in the golden era and either stayed on until their hubris cast them down or jumped ship (or were pushed) and went on to reform as a member of a gun for hire outfit like Tango or Platinum.

If the old system is still so damn healthy, where are this generation's equivalents? Where's Mikami's successor at Capcom or Konami or wherever? These men are at the back half of their careers at this point. If the system were still working the way it was when they were making their names, there would be new blood to talk about.

 

[El Sloth]

I don't see what's so outrageous about Kohler's conclusion. It seems pretty reasonable to me to say that as games become more expensive to make, especially in the midst of a shrinking market at home, big Japanese companies will be less likely to completely entrust large amounts of resources in the hands of a single person.

Where's the sensationalism

I don't see any good arguments in this thread for why he's wrong either. I don't think Miyazaki's success proves anything one way or the other

 

[threelights]

You have to articulate with a supporting counter argument. One word answers are for 2nd graders

To be fair, Kohler wrote way more than one word and his argument is not much better than that of a 2nd grader.

 

[Kasumin]

Xbox One: Selling poorly like everyone expected. Nothing really noteworthy considering that MS put zero effort into its presence in Japan.
Wii U: Selling fairly poorly worldwide, not just in Japan. Again, not really noteworthy as an indicator of a trend.
N3DS: Selling averagely, because Japan is saturated in the 3DS and the N3DS doesn't provide enough of an upgrade for most people to go out and adopt the N3DS en masse.
PSV: Selling quite nicely considering how dead it is in the rest of the world, but still fairly average.
PS4: Selling averagely.

So in what trends in Kohler right about consoles selling poorly? The abandonment of consoles for mobile in Japan seems to also go hand in hand in consoles offering the Japanese gamer a product that A) doesn't match their lifestyle and B) doesn't give them experiences they're interested enough in. To a large extent, consoles selling poorly seems to mostly have to do with them being mediocre products. It's not some tidal wave of destruction for AAA gaming that writers keep predicting.

I don't disagree. Mobile makes way more sense for Japanese gamers. I meant more the bit about a lot of mobile games having pseudo-gambling mechanics. That's the part that makes me sad.

 

[DarkLordMalik]

The article specifically mentions Nomura. Square removed him from directing FFXV.

No one knows the truth. No one was "removed" so until we know the truth, it is all an assumption just like the author made many of them in the article. What he forgot to mention was that Nomura left because he wanted to focus on his own series (KH 3) since this is the only official info that we have for now, so we are better of sticking with it rather than random assumptions from an author.

 

[Dysun]

The Kojima loss hurts, knowing its the last time we'll ever get anything good out of Metal Gear and potentially Silent Hill, Castlevania, or whatever other Konami IPs

at least we got Miyazaki

 

[Magic Mushroom]

The new triple-A game from Japan seems to be fast becoming what would have been considered a "mid tier" game from a generation or so ago. Judicious production values that don't break the bank. Aimed at the pure gaming audience over casual cinematic appeal. Stuff like Dark Souls, Bloodborne. Platinum titles, even The Evil Within. Plus fighting games.

And that seems just fine, because budget wise those games are not so huge and bloated that they must cater to the lowest common denominator and sell 10 million to turn a profit. And so these games are still the territory of the "auteur".

Yep. People like Kamiya and Miyazaki are true creators. For me, from 3D World to Bloodborne to Bayo 2, the best games still come from Japan.

 

[John Bender]

.....on the largely forgettable Sony PSP platform.......

What????

 

[orthodoxy1095]

I don't disagree. Mobile makes way more sense for Japanese gamers. I meant more the bit about a lot of mobile games having pseudo-gambling mechanics. That's the part that makes me sad.

Oh now that is true as hell. Definitely agree with that! Definitely saddening.

 

[Sephiroth_GR_]

The entire point of the article that everyone is refuting is that we're moving past the era of Superstar Japanese devs. So then you agree with Kohler's assessment?

No.They still are there. They are just not part of the classic Japanese publishers anymore .(Square Enix, Capcom, etc)

They have moved to either smaller teams or created their own team.

 

[Toxi]

You can disagree about "The Japanese game industry is doomed", but that's not the main thrust of this article. The argument the author is trying to make is that the Japanese big budget game industry in general is moving away from superstar game directors. Obviously that's not completely true and you can make arguments to the contrary (Sakurai's a good counter-example), but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

No.They still are there. They are just not part of the classic Japanese publishers anymore .(Square Enix, Capcom, etc)

They have moved to either smaller teams or created their own team.

And nothing precludes those smaller teams from becoming the Square Enixes and Konamis of the future.

The classic Japanese publishers that many of us grew up with are indeed struggling, but I don't think it's fair to say the Superstar Devs will disappear forever.

 

[jrDev]

*

Spoiler

And Nomura himself then moved on to SQEX next biggest title, Kingdom Hearts III. But Nomura still having an important role doesn't fit Kohler's narrative, so let's ignore that right?

**

Spoiler

The "extinction event" comment is sensationalist. The "new console are selling poorly" is a poor use of something that doesn't serve as evidence for his claim. The X1 is selling poorly...because well it was always going to sell poorly in Japan. The Wii U is selling poorly, but it's selling poorly everywhere, not just Japan. Yes, the PS4 sales are average, but I wouldn't straightup call them poor.

The sales are actually disastrous, WiiU even mores...

 

[Psycho_Mantis]

Nomura is still at SE. Miyzaki, Hashino, Kamiya, Itsuno, Ueda,....these are just the popular ones I can remember.

 

[Oppo]

Thought he made some grea tpoints in this article. Kojima was sort of the last of the big Japanese auteurs, although one certainly could make a case for Miyazaki, but Bloodborne is not a game on the same scale as MGS or FF.

(Chris likes dramatic titles. Remember The Game Console Is Dead? October, 2012. When you read it there's a line about "consoles as we know them". )

 

[Barry Burton]

Kohler makes it reasonably clear towards the end of the article that this doesn't apply to the publishers that are also the platform holders (Sony and Nintendo), nor the independent third-party developers that are contracted by the larger first- and third-party publishers. With regards to Konami, Capcom, Square-Enix and Sega and internally-developed big-budget auteur-driven games, he's spot-on and this shouldn't come as news to anyone. It's not about Nintendo, it's not about From Software.

That's the larger problem with the way the article was written, though. The headline is a big generalization and intended to draw clicks. And most of the article uses the same generalizations and blanket-statements, though partially rectified by the paragraph at the end that is like "Hey, things are a little different at Sony and Nintendo!" (and Microsoft too, with them publishing Platinum's Scalebound).

He spends most of the article describing how this is happening at Konami, Square, and Capcom and he's right. The days of a Kojima, Mikami or Nomura dragging out development of a big-budget game over several years with all sorts of redesigns is coming to an end, and it has to. We saw this a few years ago in the Western scene, with Irrational closing its doors after the Levine-led Bioshock Infinite took way too long and cost way too much to come out.

His fault is going with the hyperbolic and oversimplified "this is happening to all of Japan", while not making more of an effort to detail the other side of the coin, that this is still working at Platinum, From and others and that for obvious reasons, games funded by the first party console-makers can afford to take risks that the Capcoms of the world cannot. His overall argument is valid when applied to the big 3 or 4 Japanese third-party publishers, which is something he should have made more clear.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

The sales are actually disastrous, WiiU even mores...

Sheesh, I though Kohler was being sensationalist. The sales of the PS4 in Japan are not disastrous. They may not be exceeding expectations and reviving the entire Japanese industry like some hoped, but it's certainly moving right along.

 

[EMT0]

???

Konami seems to be stepping out of console game development post-MGSV and Capcom's productivity dropped like a rock from last gen to this one.

Konami's the odd case out, before the Kojima debacle they were looking pretty healthy. Meanwhile, Square is bringing us a solid handful of FF, Dragon Quest, and KH to consoles after skipping a generation, Namco's got a crapton of licensed games that all look fairly promising, Bloodborne happened, Atlus is putting out Persona 5 after having skipped most of last gen minus Catherine, and Capcom's got a solid round of games out so far and more to come in the near future. The only one really dropping the ball(aside from Konami) is Sega, IMO.

 

[Alebrije]

Shoking news !!!!

That era ended late PS2 and pS3 360 generation

 

[Fallout-NL]

MIyazaki: Do you even know what he looks like?

You're damn right I do.

 

[DiGiKerot]

Hideki Kamiya (Platinum Games)
Katsuhiro Harada (Tekken)
Yoshinori Ono (Street Fighter)
Kazunori Yamauchi (Gran Turismo)
Yoshinori Kitase (Final Fantasy)
Masahiro Sakurai (Smash Bros.)
Hideo Baba (Tales of)
Hidetaka Miyazaki (From Software)
Katsura Hashino (Persona)
Yuji Hori (Dragon Quest)
Tetsuya Nomura (Kingdom Hearts)

In the author's mind, perhaps these designers don't exist anymore.

The whole article is full of his assumptions like that, most of which are wrong. It is a really poor article.

Whilst I agree it's hamfisted, and Koji Igarashi has no business being mentioned on there given he was always working under constraints, the point of the article isn't that there are no auteurs in Japanese games development, or that Japan doesn't still make AAA games, or even necessarily that their games are irrelevant, though. It's that the game design super-stars born of the wild successes of the PSOne (and, to a lesser extent, PS2) era, who seemingly answered to no-one other than themselves and led projects that were prone to either wild excess or that spun wildly out of control, are no longer being seen as golden gooses, not to be tampered with, at their respective homes.

Most of the guys you mention, aside from Yamauchi and maybe Hori, actually make pretty modest games within the respective genres in which they work, and actually turn in work with some degree of regularity. Kojima, on the other hand, takes years to make games, and presumably spends a small fortune on crazy promotional projects like Moby Dick Studios and PT, or in making games where icecubes melt individually for no good reason. Nomura spent years at the helm of Versus-13 without producing anything seen outside of the studio other than a few trailers, and it's yet to be seen if he's going to be reigned in to a sensible production schedule of Kingdom Hearts 3.

I'm not really sure there's any argument to be made against the fact that the number of Japanese game leads being allowed to spend practically infinite money based on the strong sales of their previous titles is decreasing in favour of those with a proven record of reliably delivering solid but more modest titles, but *shrug*

 

[EmSeta]

Great analysis.

 

[B E N K E]

Rather than listing names an alternative way of looking at it would be to say that people like Mikami, Inafune, Itagaki have gained their independence. What they do with it, well, varies. But to say that there's something inherently bad about creative people leaving their place of employment and starting their own companies is simply wrong. I'm sure there are investors lining up to court Kojima as he exits Konami. We likely won't be talking about Konami in 50 years, but we may be talking about Kojima's contributions.

 

[Toxi]

No one knows the truth. No one was "removed" so until we know the truth, it is all an assumption just like the author made many of them in the article. What he forgot to mention was that Nomura left because he wanted to focus on his own series (KH 3) since this is the only official info that we have for now, so we are better of sticking with it rather than random assumptions from an author.

You're right that I was making an assumption I shouldn't have about Square removing Nomura from the project. I can think of a lot of plausible reasons Nomura would want to leave FFXV's development, but leaving because he wants to work on Kingdom Hearts III is some hilarious PR bullshit. Directors don't leave their high-budget several-years-in-the-making brainchild projects because they want to work on a completely new high-budget game.

 

[Pyrrhus]

No.They still are there. They are just not part of the classic Japanese publishers anymore .(Square Enix, Capcom, etc)

They have moved to either smaller teams or created their own team.

They are no longer superstars. People in the know of a certain age like ourselves still revere them, but they are no longer titans of the medium. Tango and Platinum are tiny houses that live by taking contracts from larger companies like Bethesda, Nintendo, and Microsoft. These are guys down in the trenches doing great work and showing why they used to be superstars. But they are no longer superstars. The public doesn't know their names and they are no longer in a position to demand special treatment or extra resources.

A rockstar is someone like Kojima or Yuji Naka in his day. Someone so visible and intrinsically linked to the value of the game or series they work on that they get special treatment and have wide control over the development of the game.

Back when they were making Sonic 2, Sega gave Yuji Naka a raise and a fucking Porsche so he wouldn't jump ship and would instead go to America and program Sonic 2. This, you need to remember, is in an era when Japanese companies largely wouldn't let the developers put in their real names in the game credits because they didn't want headhunters from other companies to track them down and offer them better deals.

By the mid '90s, Naka had enough power that he could tell the company that he wasn't going to allow the American subsidiary to use the NiGHTS engine for Sonic XTreme, even though they needed a 32-bit Sonic game so badly they could taste it. Hell, he was able to fuck around and make NiGHTS and Burning Rangers instead of giving Sega the next gen Sonic they needed. That's what it means to be a rock star game dev.

You think anybody would get away with that today? No? That's because the era of the rock star Japanese developer is over.

 

[FunkyPajamas]

Whilst I agree it's hamfisted, and Koji Igarashi has no business being mentioned on there given he was always working under constraints, the point of the article isn't that there are no auteurs in Japanese games development, or that Japan doesn't still make AAA games, or even necessarily that their games are irrelevant, though. It's that the game design super-stars born of the wild successes of the PSOne (and, to a lesser extent, PS2) era, who seemingly answered to no-one other than themselves and led projects that were prone to either wild excess or that spun wildly out of control, are no longer being seen as golden gooses, not to be tampered with, at their respective homes.

Thank you. This is what I've wanted to post since the first page.

Either you guys are reading this article the wrong way or are taking this way too personally. Nobody is saying that creativity in Japan is dead, or that there are no longer any awesome games coming.

 

[ZdkDzk]

No one knows the truth. No one was "removed" so until we know the truth, it is all an assumption just like the author made many of them in the article. What he forgot to mention was that Nomura left because he wanted to focus on his own series (KH 3) since this is the only official info that we have for now, so we are better of sticking with it rather than random assumptions from an author.

VersusXIII was his other personal series. If you kept up with him back in the day, it's pretty clear that he cared about it a lot. One of the main reason he never got around to KH3, was because VersusXIII (same KH3 team) was in development hell, which in turn was because (in Nomura's own words) SE treated him like a dog and kept dragging him and the team away from the project to work on other things.

I'm not going to say he was outright forced off of FF15, but I doubt he wanted to leave it or the team he'd planed KH3 around.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Phil Fish was ahead of everyone on this one.

No, him and everyone have gotten past his bad behavior era. It's especially evident when you note how many of that attitude's old arguing partners run free.

Kohler makes it reasonably clear towards the end of the article that this doesn't apply to the publishers that are also the platform holders (Sony and Nintendo), nor the independent third-party developers that are contracted by the larger first- and third-party publishers. With regards to Konami, Capcom, Square-Enix and Sega and internally-developed big-budget auteur-driven games, he's spot-on and this shouldn't come as news to anyone. It's not about Nintendo, it's not about From Software.

That's the larger problem with the way the article was written, though. The headline is a big generalization and intended to draw clicks. And most of the article uses the same generalizations and blanket-statements, though partially rectified by the paragraph at the end that is like "Hey, things are a little different at Sony and Nintendo!" (and Microsoft too, with them publishing Platinum's Scalebound).

He spends most of the article describing how this is happening at Konami, Square, and Capcom and he's right. The days of a Kojima, Mikami or Nomura dragging out development of a big-budget game over several years with all sorts of redesigns is coming to an end, and it has to. We saw this a few years ago in the Western scene, with Irrational closing its doors after the Levine-led Bioshock Infinite took way too long and cost way too much to come out.

His fault is going with the hyperbolic and oversimplified "this is happening to all of Japan", while not making more of an effort to detail the other side of the coin, that this is still working at Platinum, From and others and that for obvious reasons, games funded by the first party console-makers can afford to take risks that the Capcoms of the world cannot. His overall argument is valid when applied to the big 3 or 4 Japanese third-party publishers, which is something he should have made more clear.

This is some nice context. Thanks.

 

[Natureboy99]

Holy sensationalism batman

Pretty much. There are a few Japanese devs that have really gone downhill though: Nintendo, Capcom,

Spoiler

soon Konami

 

[oti]

Pretty much. There are a few Japanese devs that have really gone downhill though: Nintendo, Capcom,

Spoiler

soon Konami

Oh boy.

 

[daxgame]

It's frowned upon.

The website gets no clicks, and no revenue if you just past theentire article and not just highlights.

then that's good, in this case. The article doesn't seem exactly based on "research".

 

[mreddie]

We're doomed!

 

[Celine]

80 million PSPs sold. Yeah. It was really forgettable.

Well SquareEnix sure did forget to publish the game outside Japan ;-)

 

[DJSharpeCheddar]

then that's good, in this case. The article doesn't seem exactly based on "research".

Nah, just a decade plus of covering video games, an encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese video games and their history, having literally written the book on Nintendo, etc. etc. etc.

 

[Khrno]

Final Fantasy XV, too, previously was the domain of Square Enix’s last remaining Big Name Director, Tetsuya Nomura.

In only 3 years, Yoshida Naoki has earned the title of "big name director" already.

I think he'll be on ARR for one more expansion after Heavensward and then he'll get the chance to do single player games, and when that time comes it will be a huge deal.

Also, Tabata can reach that level after FFXV, his previous smaller projects were great and had good reception and now working on the big title can earn him that place.

 

[DarkLordMalik]

Whilst I agree it's hamfisted, and Koji Igarashi has no business being mentioned on there given he was always working under constraints, the point of the article isn't that there are no auteurs in Japanese games development, or that Japan doesn't still make AAA games, or even necessarily that their games are irrelevant, though. It's that the game design super-stars born of the wild successes of the PSOne (and, to a lesser extent, PS2) era, who seemingly answered to no-one other than themselves and led projects that were prone to either wild excess or that spun wildly out of control, are no longer being seen as golden gooses, not to be tampered with, at their respective homes.

If this was his point, then he is really LTTP because that era basically ended at the start of PS3/X360 generation.

You're right that I was making an assumption I shouldn't have about Square removing Nomura from the project. I can think of a lot of plausible reasons Nomura would want to leave FFXV's development, but leaving because he wants to work on Kingdom Hearts III is some hilarious PR bullshit. Directors don't leave their high-budget several-years-in-the-making brainchild projects because they want to work on a completely new high-budget game.

This is the only official info though, and I do agree it could be some PR bullshit. Anyways, we don't really know the terms and conditions that made Nomura leave the project and beside he got his fame as director/designer from Kingdom Hearts and not Final Fantasy, so he essentially went back to work on his baby.

VersusXIII was his other personal series. If you kept up with him back in the day, it's pretty clear that he cared about it a lot. One of the main reason he never got around to KH3, was because VersusXIII (same KH3 team) was in development hell, which in turn was because (in Nomura's own words) SE treated him like a dog and kept dragging him and the team away from the project to work on other things.

I'm not going to say he was outright forced off of FF15, but I doubt he wanted to leave it or the team he'd planed KH3 around.

Can you provide me a source for this quote?

AFAIK Versus XIII was put on hold for several reasons. The biggest one being the nightmare that was Crystal Tools engine and making an open world game that was envisioned by Nomura was simply not possible, even on the PS3.

Second is the fact that SE really messed up badly with FF XIV development and they had to locate as many resources as they could to put the project back up and this was another major factor in the "development hell" of Versus XIII.

 

[Zombine]

It's not that Japanese devs aren't leaders. What's happened is that the market has shaped and changed since the PS2, and Japanese publishers and devs have to apply their resources where they will see less risk and the highest return. This happens to be the f2p smartphone game currently, and that doesn't necessarily fall in line what the western "core" gamer is looking for. There are still wonderful Japanese devs putting out quality titles, but they now have other developers and publishers in Europe and America who are their equals.

Long story short, the playing field is now leveled. That's all.

 

[Sorral]

This piece implies that Kojima or most of those big name directors were releasing bombas left and right.

Also, I thought Nomura and his team for XV were being dragged into XIII's and XIV's development most of the time for years.

 

[Hahs]

Most of Japan’s most famous game designers already have split from the publishers that made them famous, opening studios of their own.

Kojima-san also should've left Konami for his own start-up. I get why he stayed - stability and what-not - but in the end he was still a puppet subject to being fired on a whim.

If you want to be an auteur, you can do it on your own dime.

As it should be - and it's better this way - It's not like Kojima can't afford it. I find it hard to believe that he NEVER encountered individuals that dwell in private investment sectors willing work with him. The guy has money, the guy has clout, he has a following...

Source

 

[Sephiroth_GR_]

They are no longer superstars. People in the know of a certain age like ourselves still revere them, but they are no longer titans of the medium. Tango and Platinum are tiny houses that live by taking contracts from larger companies like Bethesda, Nintendo, and Microsoft. These are guys down in the trenches doing great work and showing why they used to be superstars. But they are no longer superstars. The public doesn't know their names and they are no longer in a position to demand special treatment or extra resources.

A rockstar is someone like Kojima or Yuji Naka in his day. Someone so visible and intrinsically linked to the value of the game or series they work on that they get special treatment and have wide control over the development of the game.

Back when they were making Sonic 2, Sega gave Yuji Naka a raise and a fucking Porsche so he wouldn't jump ship and would instead go to America and program Sonic 2. This, you need to remember, is in an era when Japanese companies largely wouldn't let the developers put in their real names in the game credits because they didn't want headhunters from other companies to track them down and offer them better deals.

By the mid '90s, Naka had enough power that he could tell the company that he wasn't going to allow the American subsidiary to use the NiGHTS engine for Sonic XTreme, even though they needed a 32-bit Sonic game so badly they could taste it. Hell, he was able to fuck around and make NiGHTS and Burning Rangers instead of giving Sega the next gen Sonic they needed. That's what it means to be a rock star game dev.

You think anybody would get away with that today? No? That's because the era of the rock star Japanese developer is over.

I think you're making an over-generalization. Rock star Japanese developers are not over. They are just not so "Rock Star" than a view decades ago (Shingeru Miyamoto level etc.).

Did anyone know Miyazaki a few years ago before the wide-appealing success of Dark Souls or Kamiya from his work on the first Devil May Cry before Bayonetta 2 Nintendo partnership or Itagaki before his partnership with MS than the hardcore?

Those are circles...they come and they go. Maybe in the future other japanese developers will rise ( Xenoblade Chronicles X creator?) in popularity and others will fall...they will always exist,they'll just not have the same impact that some others did decades ago.

And remember the market now is a lot bigger and more saturated than it was in the 90's.A lot of good developers have to compete with a lot more good developers (in terms of popularity).Instead the market gives emphasis now to teams,but that doesn't mean there aren't stars among those teams...

 

[Inuhanyou]

Wow, that's a bit of a hyperbolic article don't you think? Its as bad as the PC/consoles are dead declarations.

Its no different in the west really, where people leave their publishers every day. In Japan, there are devs breaking out of the corporate yes man structure, as some publishers increasingly become more authoritative on everything having to do with creative and financial decision making.

And with SE, they are realizing that being secretive about projects in an ivory tower is one way to fail, same way Sony learned the hard way about designing hardware in the modern world

 

[Kimawolf]

This is no better than the blogger stuff always derided here. And the era of superstars in gaming is over period because publishers know game names sell games not people behind them.

 

[Hasemo]

Eh, Square did the same thing with the Type 0 demo in Japan - they published survey and made changes to the game based on some of the opinions.

 

[fvng]

To be fair, Kohler wrote way more than one word and his argument is not much better than that of a 2nd grader.

That's not an excuse to stoop to the same intellectual level.

 

[John Rabbit]

article title needs to be "The Era of Japan’s the All-Powerful Videogame Designers Is Over".

other than Sid Meier, I can't think of a single non-Japanese game designer that's still garnering acclaim for their games and is still attached to a major studio (maybe Neil Druckmann). and other than Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier, I can't think of a single game designer period that still has their name on the box ABOVE the title. it just isn't how games are marketed and perceived anymore, and really hasn't been that way for almost 20+ years.

 

[Tiktaalik]

The author sort of misses that most of those big name auteurs are still finding work or doing projects, and that new "auteurs" like Tabata and Hidetaka Miyazaki are emerging. The designers will live on to the loss of the publishers who have nudged them out.

I think you're missing the point. These developers are still working, they're not dead, but it is significant that they are no longer able to bend a publisher to their will and control the massive resources of the publisher for their pet projects.

 

[Tiktaalik]

There are still a bunch of 'big' directors in Japan, and they are still as powerful as a decade ago; the author just doesn't know them.

Please continue and name them for us.

 

[Pyrrhus]

Did anyone know Miyazaki a few years ago before the wide-appealing success of Dark Souls or Kamiya from his work on the first Devil May Cry before Bayonetta 2 Nintendo partnership or Itagaki before his partnership with MS than the hardcore?

Those are circles...they come and they go. Maybe in the future other japanese developers will rise ( Xenoblade Chronicles X creator?) in popularity and others will fall...they will always exist,they'll just not have the same impact that some others did decades ago.

And remember the market now is a lot bigger and more saturated than it was in the 90's.A lot of good developers have to compete with a lot more good developers (in terms of popularity).Instead the market gives emphasis now to teams,but that doesn't mean there aren't stars among those teams...

People knew Kamiya first from Resident Evil 2. And Xenoblade's director is Tetsuya Takahashi, who made his name at Squaresoft in the early '90s working on FFV and VI and later Chrono Trigger and Xenogears. So, again, both of them are old guard from the golden era.

It's not that these guys no longer exist, it's that their positions are less powerful and they don't have any other big "names" coming up in their wake. The old way of doing things has ended and these guys are like the last of the Tyrannosaurs in a world now ruled by proto-rats.

 

[Hahs]

Wow, that's a bit of a hyperbolic article don't you think? Its as bad as the PC/consoles are dead declarations.

Its no different in the west really, where people leave their publishers every day. In Japan, there are devs breaking out of the corporate yes man structure, as some publishers increasingly become more authoritative on everything having to do with creative and financial decision making.

And with SE, they are realizing that being secretive about projects in an ivory tower is one way to fail, same way Sony learned the hard way about designing hardware in the modern world

In a way, I think it dilutes the public consensus of Konami simply firing Kojima. What I pulled from it was; it speaks for what's really happening, and what really (eventually SHOULD happen). For me, this is no different than a veteran player stepping away from the team to start or coach their own.

 

[10k]

Well that was a hyperbolic article if I've ever read one.