14 DAY TRIAL // An interview with Konami's sound director Akira Yamaoka has revealed one of the most surprising aspects surrounding video game development in Japan: that it's becoming too sophisticated of a task for them every time they have a new project on their hands. More than that, Japanese developers are getting old, while the Americans always have fresh minds on big projects.
"There's a huge gap, actually. They (the American team working on Silent Hill 5) are very advanced. I'm Japanese, and I think this is not just with Silent Hill but with the whole of the industry - I look at what American developers are doing and I think wow... Japan is in trouble," said Akira Yamaoka according to megagames.com.
"...Japan is divided into developers and publishers. Publishers have to create a game in a short amount of time at low cost, and it's a lot of pressure on them in that respect, and they pass that on to the developers. So basically it has to be done as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the people doing this are getting old like me. And tired! And the salary isn't that great. [...]Then I look at the west, and I see all these young guys coming up so fast, it's just amazing."
Akira also offers an example of why things tend to be messed up when it comes to developing games in Japan: "...we realized that we needed a new driver for some graphics program. That happens of course. So we looked around for it, and we found it, OK. Same maker, same everything, should be fine right? But the problem is they're all in English. So we get this thing and we have to localize it into Japanese.
So we don't have a lot of people who can understand English deeply enough for something like that, so that reduces speed. And while we're waiting for that, we're already a step behind everyone else who can understand it intuitively. This sort of thing builds up, and we just fall further behind."
Up until this point I thought Japan would be the last place on Earth where game developers didn't have the necessary tools or knowledge to deal with development on sophisticated video games. Now I don't know what to think anymore... This piece of news has brought my entire reference system to its knees.