Japan, despite housing a game development industry that single-handedly reinvigorated console gaming with the introduction of the NES and then blasted it into the mainstream with the original PlayStation, has fallen on hard times. While many of the developers responsible for some of the franchises that define gaming – including Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, Castlevania, Street Fighter, and Metal Gear Solid – are Japanese, it’s difficult to deny that the HD era has proven to be an agonizingly difficult transition for the Land of the Rising Sun.
During the last several years, we saw a large number of Japanese developers quickly return to the relative safety of the tablet, smartphone, and dedicated handheld markets after dabbling in HD development, and we saw the output of other developers – like Sony’s Team ICO – dry up completely as they struggled for years with crafting tools to adequately and efficiently handle the creation of HD content. The reasons for the shift from consoles to portables are varied and diverse – ranging from inadequate staffing and the resistance to licensing existing middleware tools, to the top-down, creator-focused team structure that tends to be more common overseas – but the results were the same: an entire generation of gaming built around safe, marketable AAA Western franchises on consoles with many smaller Japanese games being forcefully pushed to the side.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/26/the-return-of-the-rising-sun
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