Kojima: Japanese Developers Are No Longer Motivated

Hideo Kojima has recently expressed using the TwitLonger service his opinions on the causes of the downfall of the Japanese video game industry. He is just one of long series of Japanese developers to have talked about their concern about the future of their country in the entertainment software business.

Kojima has isolated a cause for all of this, writing that, “The West is very motivated. The designers and to-be-designers in the West have the focus, ambition, and ability to make their dream become true. So it is not the Japanese technology or culture that is losing, we are lacking the motivation.”

He continued to comment, disappointed, that, “Lately I have come to conclusion that, with highly motivated foreigners... it doesn't matter where they are from, working with highly motivated individuals is the only way to move forward. I am tired of taking care of people who do not have the passion. ”

Kojima also wrote that he saw the declining quality of the Japanese education system as a cause of concern and as a guilty party for the problems that are plaguing the local video games industry. “In contrast, the number of students that study abroad from Japan has decreased,” Kojima wrote. “There are very few Japanese students at the prestigious Harvard University, and in MIT...zero. The engineering population in Japan may be in jeopardy. We should first review our education system here in Japan.”

He also said that spare time should be used for educating oneself, reading a book, watching movie and cultivating new skills and abilities. A desire for this comes only from the passion of working in the video game industry and the lack of which is the cause for the string of failures that the Japanese video game industry has been experiencing in the last few years.