What, if at all, is the PC gaming market like in Japan? Mainly Japanese titles? What import stuff gets a lot of PC time there? Anything other than MMO?
Thus spoke Aszurom in another thread.
And I intend to answer to the best knowledge I can.
The PC market in Japan right now is a great deal healthier than it has been in years. But first a little history.
When the Famicom was around in the 80s, Japan’s PC market thrived alongside the console market. There were just about as many non-dirty PC games produced for PCs as they were for consoles and while there were less huge hits, many were popular.
Still, as with consoles, Japanese PC’s most popular genre were RPGs. And when the Super Famicom introduced Enix’s famous rivalry with Square, producing many innovative RPGs from all developers that took less influence from Western sources and more from instrinsic Japanese sources, the entire RPG genre shifted to more insular culture than the D&D-type games that more popular beforehand.
For a while, PCs weathered this change, because NEC’s PC Engine was like the Xbox of today, the stopgap between consoles and PCs and many a popular PC game wound up ported onto it, shuffling attention between the two markets and keeping the PC up there. To a lesser extent, the Sega CD. When the PlayStation and Saturn came out, the PC gradually began to decline, mostly because native formats of Japanese PCs (which were not taken over by Windows until way later in the 90s) were very much weaksauce compared to others worldwide. Furthermore, a lot of hardware was kept by Japanese PC users for a long time, making publishers need to court very old hardware. They couldn’t keep up with the generation that produced the Saturn, PSX and N64.
At the same time, Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial created a short fad of what you call dating sims and what we euphemize as “adventure” games. At the same time, Chunsoft’s Kamaitachi no Yoru made what are called sound novels, which aren’t really games, so much as they are books with sound and graphics that allow some choice in the narrative, and many endings, but are not comparable to choose your own adventure because sound novels are often written by people of actual talent and their stories aren’t meant to offer many forks as much as they cover one strong story in many different viewpoints. This made the most popular type of game on the PC gradually become innocent, clean “adventure” and sound novel games. After a while though, even those faded, and in an effort to sell publishers began to throw back in smut to games that were obviously not meant merely to wack off too. And obviously when you associate yourself with porn you lose a lot of your selling power to a wider audience, at least in Japan.
Several things happened at the turn of the millenium that turned PC gaming around for Japan, but its worth noting that the slide is pretty irrevocable and every month 10-20 new hentai games are released on Japanese PCs. I, however, count these games more as a product of the porn industry, than the games industry. I’m sure some gamers buy them, but a normal person into PC or console games isn’t going to consider a hentai game as competition, in the same way that we don’t consider Norton Antivirus competition for a game. (The fact that a great deal of hentai games are hardly even games counts as well.) The big question is are hentai games the only thing of worth driving the market? Ever since the resurrection, not at all.
What were those several things that happened? First, cellphones. As you may know, Japanese and Korean eat American cellphones alive and pick their teeth with the bones. Thus, cellphone gaming is a great deal more popular in Japan than it is in the US. The hardware available for complex gametypes was already in place as early as 2000-2001 and the games were being produced, such as strategy, RPG (in some cases, RTS) and so on. Many Japanese used their cellphones for PC uses more than their PCs (and its probably still that way, but its lessened somewhat over the years). You can buy many products by using cellphones (you know, those pixelly boxes you point your cellphone at), and this in turn, spurred online buying on the computer.
Second, Microsoft. It took a lot longer for Windows to become the de facto standard here for gamers. But once it did, it goes easier for publishers to support PCs as a whole. Sometimes monopoly is good, I suppose.
Third, Korea, the largest source of imported PC games. The ban on Japanese products in Korea was lifted several years back. And while we gave them the LEGIT PlayStation, they gave us back all their games from a PC market that’s still much stronger than ours. While of course Korea and Japan still bicker like angry housewives, its undeniable that for the younger generation, the two countries are moving closer together. Because Korean and Japanese are as similar to each other as two romance languages (say Spanish and French), they are not nearly as many translation difficulties and because culture between our countries is much more similar, aesthetic qualities are more similar, as is the approach to design that more Japanese are familiar with.
Fourth, Final Fantasy XI, without which the MMO would not have taken Japanese PCs by storm, the aftershocks of which have brought the other parts of the market up considerably. It also got the big console companies more interested in doing something about the PC market. Tales of Eternia Online is Namco’s first homebrewn PC game that I can ever remember.
Fifth, Falcom, the most popular Japanese PC gamer maker experienced a huge renaissance around this time, bringing out brand new Ys games and a whole lot of other stuff. They are one of the company’s most responsible for bringing Japanese gamers up to speed on Korean products. And their PC games sell really well, especially Ys. They mostly make RPGs, but beside Ys, they have the Legend of Heroes and Xanadu series, on top of many smaller games. (Vantage Master is available for free in English if you want it, its an SRPG focusing on multiplayer.)
Sixth, Grand Theft Auto, which is probably the most imported Western game ever. Other than Capcom, Japanese publishers seem to not want to touch this series and we still don’t have San Andreas for the PS2, let alone Liberty City Stories, but that doesn’t stop the demand for the PC versions or imports. Naturally, Grand Theft Auto spiked interest in other Western games and Capcom makes some nice dough off of translations of many Western games. Sure, they just came out with Lionheart over here and it will probably cost $80, but the market is there now to support it. (My enthusiasm for Divine Divinity is not indicative of a fluke in taste, its definitely one of the more popular Western PC games to be released here.) The Port Royale series, Hegemonia, Age of Wonders, Warcraft III, Counterstrike (the PC versions), Settlers of Catan, Empire Earth and so on and so forth. Capcom kind of stands alone because unlike what I hear of their translations of their own software for other markets, they seem to more careful when translating other markets software to Japan, which is appreciated by gamers like me who don’t want the writing and language or appeal ruined in the translation.
Which brings me to my next point. The Japanese PC market is going to have trouble growing farther now, because of Sega. When VF4 and Initial D came out with their memory card systems for arcades, they also allowed “saving” of a sort to happen for arcade games, and that has allowed like strategy, card RPGs, action RPGs, simulations and MMOs to appear in arcades. So now games like Counter Strike, that would go straight to PC, have their most popular renditions as arcade games built from the ground up for the arcade environment (but still online). Namco does this, Counterstrike NEO and its pretty cool and the line is popular enough for them to continue with new versions. Its at least the only version I like playing and made cooler by the fact that they can uses arcade hardware to do nifty things. Other stuff like Quest of D and Avalon’s Key (RPGs), Druaga Online (dungeon hack) and Idol Master (simulation) are siphoning off an area where PCs were supposed to pick up the slack.
One interesting thing about Japan-produced PC games is that the fundamental disagreement on control extends to PC games, when there is mouse control, everything is accessed through the mouse, almost always. More often, the shift, return, z, x, c, a, s, d keys are used and arrow keys are used to simulate a console controller. Even more often, its just shift and return and the arrow keys, for cancel, or confirm in menus and maybe one or two more keys. The type of control seen in most American FPSes where use the keyboard and the mouse and there’s all sorts of hotkeys? Anathema to Japanese tastes and intuition, and regarded as intensely unintuitive and cumbersome compared to console control. Japanese elitists would say that PC control is crippled because it doesn’t have one standard controller and users must often use the keyboard and mouse.
For Japanese-produced games and more boredom from my staid writing, proceed to Post 2.
-Kitsune
