With the Tokyo Game Show wrapping up, it’s a time for all the games journalists of the world to remember the awesome things they’ve seen, like Peace Walker and everything Final Fantasy. For others, it’s a time to bemoan the fall of the Japanese game industry. One such sour-puss is Capcom’s Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man and my personal favorite, Dead Rising.
Where others looked around the TGS show floor and saw hope for Japan’s flagging creative teams, Inafune saw only despair and darkness. Quoth the raven:
“Personally when I looked around [at] all the different games at the TGS floor, I said, ‘Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.'”
Harsh words, Mr. Inafune. While the games industry has kind of turned on its heel in the last decade or so, being predominantly a Western enterprise, I don’t really think that Japan is “finished”. Sure, they’re hitting a rough patch, but things will turn around. Right?
Of course, Inafune shouldn’t be taken at face value: he left Capcom out of the list of dismal failures of TGS ’09, and as Destructoid pointed out, avoided mentioning the irony of handing off Dead Rising 2 to a Western company (Canada-based Blue Castle Games).
The decline of the Japanese game industry has been a hot button issue for a while, but I think this is the first time that anyone from inside the the industry has come out and said that we’re looking at the end. What do you guys think? Is Mr. Inafune exaggerating, or will we see the end of Japanese-made games in our lifetime?
Source: 1up