Konami though....
Iga is making Bloodstained, and Kojima is making Death Stranding. That's about the best we could hope for.
Konami though....
I just looked​ up:
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ea/financials?query=income-statement
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ttwo/financials?query=income-statement
http://quotes.wsj.com/UBSFF/financials/annual/income-statement
EA and Ubisoft saw a decline in revenue compared to last year. And look like Take Two posted a loss.
Activision doing great lately yes but looks like that on back of Blizzard/mobile mainly.
japanese game resurgence
gta5 in its 4th year still outsells all of japan this year
One game
Japanese games as a whole still suffer from that unique Japanese Jank that makes them harder to play than Western games.
What resurgence? Western games haven't lost much market share so I don't see this supposed resurgence. Not in the PC or home console markets anyway.
I mean, what Japanese title are you expecting to outsell the big Western games this year? (COD, Battlefront, Destiny 2, Red Dead 2, etc)
Horizon, a new IP totally crushed the entire "Japanese Revitalization" this year outside of Zelda
Horizon will likely outsell every Q1 Japanese title combined minus Zelda
Japanese games as a whole still suffer from that unique Japanese Jank that makes them harder to play than Western games.
The Japanese are still way behind Western corps for tech and games. Capcom and Fromsoftware seems to be the only one's who can keep up, most of the time.
I mean Nintendo just outshined most if not all western open world games with Zelda without being a technical marvel.
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Look at their stock price which is the real telling example. 2K only posted a loss due to the way they report earnings look at the actual stock climb
EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and 2K are all massively up over the last year.
Activision stock up from 32.41 to 49.20
EA stock up from 64.79 to 89.81
Ubisoft up from 26.85 to 36.89
2K up from 39.60 to 59.00
Literally every one of the "Big 4" Western publishers are hugely up from even 12 months ago
It's more like NCL have just caught up with all the rest. Having a true open world console game is nothing new at all.
What other open world game does what Zelda does?
Basically any Western open-world RPG from the last 10 years. The only major difference is in art direction and the look of the game.
Basically any Western open-world RPG from the last 10 years. The only major difference is in art direction and the look of the game.
You haven't played Zelda.
Kind of surprised so much of this thread has ended up about sales and now stocks? I kind of interpreted and responded as such, as should Western developers be wary of becoming creatively stagnant in the face of the success of recent Japanese games in their reception. Did OP ever follow up clarifying he did actually mean he thinks JP games will outsell western games this year? Feels like what a lot of the responses are geared towards.
Obviously there's a healthy debate there to be had whether or not as a creative you should ever be wary in the face of creativity and if in fact devs in the west are in a rut at all. Saleswise seems so obvious it can't have been the point though, right?
Except that still doesnt work since plenty of those western games do well critically and many people love them. Which the sales back up. So its just bullshit all around.
I mean Nintendo just outshined most if not all western open world games with Zelda without being a technical marvel.
In fact I would say most Western games are in some ways behind Japanese games in terms of gameplay.
Except that still doesnt work since plenty of those western games do well critically and many people love them. Which the sales back up. So its just bullshit all around.
More like some people have a hard time dealing with the fact that the market doesnt care about the games they love as much as they do. Not even the Japanese market does, if the shrinking console and handheld markets are anything to go by.
Japanese games as a whole still suffer from that unique Japanese Jank that makes them harder to play than Western games.
If there is one area I hope (major) western-developed games learn from Japan through this amazing string of Japanese releases over the last couple months, it's personality.
Yakuza 0, NieR: Automata, Gravity Rush 2, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Persona 5. All in like 2 months.
Compare any of that shit to the fucking sorry excuse of a personality in Ghost Recon: Wildlands... it's not a favorable comparison.
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Nope. I think Japan has had a stronger output recently critically, but commercially, most of the top rated games of the past few months that have come out of Japan will struggle to crack 1-2m units, save for Zelda.
Games from the top western publishers are becoming stale af, but they have enough pull that at least for now, they don't need to worry about sales.
I'd love it if we could stop dividing games up into 'japan' and 'not japan'. It made sense when the Japanese industry was greater than everything else on consoles combined but these days it's basically comparing the output of one country to the combined output of the dozens of countrys that make up 'the west' when their games industries are pretty sizeable. It just seems ridiculous to me to badge the entire games industries of pretty much every nation west of Russia under one banner and then suggest that one country has to compete with that combined output all at once. It's not as if all the cash ends up in one pot called 'western development', the main competitor of most western studios is other western studios, and smaller western devs have been just as likely as Japanese ones to collapse under the pressures of industry changes brought on by the AAA industry raising the bar of what customers expect.
With regard to the OP, no, the bigger western developers don't need to worry about a handful of relatively niche Japanese games getting a good critical reception. If they are sensible they will look at why those mechanics-heavy titles play well with the Gaf audience, but really with the budgets the big western publishers play with they want stuff that reliably appeals to a broad customer base, not relatively niche audiences.
Even looking at the biggest ones, Resident Evil has never threatened the big western shooters (and EA pretty much funded Dead Space to pare it down to the core of body-horror, haunted house and guns). Final Fantasy has gone from being a big hitter on PlayStation to being (comparatively) quite a way down the list, despite its huge dev time and budget.
Having said all that, one player's 'I don't like Japanese weirdness' is another's 'I love the oddball quirkiness, focus on mechanics and creative costume/monster design'. Japanese games will remain popular to a subset of the wider audience because they have multiple selling points that appeal to different players. However, I don't think they'll ever force the huge global publishers funding games designed to be massive cash-cows that are culturally neutral (to western audiences raised on exported US pop culture) to be wary of them. Those modern AAA games are designed from the ground up to tap into what western audiences have been raised on, and general Japanese quirkiness, so popular to western teenagers in the 90s and thus still with some of us in our 30s and 40s, doesn't have a chance now that the western pulp stuff that games revel in like sci-fi, fantasy and superheroes are culturally mainstream and on the telly every night.
I'm not the one who clamed that they were trying to increase western sales in the first place, just that yea, obviously the most successful of recent Japanese titles are heavily western inspired, which all things considered, is absolutely a good thing. That is absolutely undeniable.
Anouma played several popular western titles and used parts of them as inspiration for mechanics in Zelda. Deal with it.Repeating your nonsense doesn't make it true.
Anouma played several popular western titles and used parts of them as inspiration for mechanics in Zelda. Deal with it.
What other open world game does what Zelda does?
Playing... what a shock that Japanese people play international titles.
While also mentioned that he didn't use ideas from those games for Zelda.
Reaching is not even the right word anymore.
Why is this so hard for you to fathom?Eiji Aonuma: What really got me more in Skyrim is when you walk and you enter a new city, there is a real shock. Ah, theres a city here! And, oh, shes so different from the others! This is the first time Ive felt this in a video game, so I wanted to duplicate it in Zelda, albeit in a slightly different way.
Why is this so hard for you to fathom?