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Here’s an interesting snippet I found today from a 4 color rebellion interview with the maintainer of a Japanese gaming site called Nintendo iNSIDE.

What do you think the difference is between Japanese and western games?

I don’t know completely, but the image in my head is that Japanese games are handmade whereas Western games seem to be the product of a corporate organisation or company. Also, Japanese people feel that western games are more difficult to play.

Initially, I assumed the remark on difficulty in play was about poorly designed user interfaces. Not just screen UI, but the entire interface into game mechanics, such as controls, etc. Then I realized, it could very well be gameplay he was talking about. I think we make games that target hardcore gamers way too often, so of course, we get games that are made for people that are really good at games.

His remark on Japanese games feeling more handmade is a bit more interesting to me. It’s not completely clear what he means by this, but it could be that our games seem more designed by committee than by a single director of interactive experience. Or he could simply be referring to the rather healthy indie game market in Japan. I hear there’s software shops that are almost entirely composed of homemade games there.

Moving on, the other day I got the March issue of Game Developer. With the Game Developer Conference this month, the issue is full of recruitment ads. I noticed a theme in the way some of the smaller studios are marketing themselves, using headlines such as:

Sick of working on version 5.0 of yet another tired franchise for your soulless publisher?

Tired of being a cog in a giant machine?

Tired of working massive hours? Want to work on a development cycle measure in months rather than years?

I looked at the March issue from last year and there weren’t any ads like these. I’d like to think it has something to do with the realization that large publishers have a total stranglehold on the industry, coupled with the lack of a proper indie infrastructure. Over the last year, this idea has been getting a lot of attention in the developer community, especially since the IGDA Burning Down the House session hosted by Eric Zimmerman at last year’s GDC.

One last observation is the the amount of traffic game development sites have been getting over the last year. In particular, Gamasutra, one of the only online venues for professional developers to share information, has been growing to reach a peak of almost 3 and a half times the largest peak in the past 5 years, and it seems to be steadily growing. The growth seems to have started around the time of the GDC and Eric Zimmerman’s session. Other popular game development sites are also seeing this same sort of growth, but I’m not sure what it all means.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Design, Games, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.