14 DAY TRIAL // Japan is one of the biggest countries worldwide in terms of gaming. Its own industry is very well built, with a few large-scale developers and publishers, but with a lot of small studios that create games for the local market, like RPGs or fantasy-inspired ones. One of the biggest gaming companies from the Land of the Rising Sun, which already is a pretty outstanding presence in other territories as well, is Capcom, which is famous for its Resident Evil and Street Fighter franchises among others.
But the influence of Capcom will soon start to diminish, especially in Japan, according to the producer of the latest iteration in the action survival series Resident Evil, Jun Takeuchi. He believes that Western developers will soon target the Asian country with custom titles that will guarantee them a big profit. While such a thing is inevitable, the Japanese developer believes that local studios need to publish titles that regular gamers can enjoy.
“I'm worried about the movements of Western developers. Japan is now their target – it's the last big marketplace. The truth is that Western studios are making great games, and they're going to continue to do so next year too. It's not good if Japanese developers are making games that can't be enjoyed by Japanese people. I hope that 2009 is a year where developers – not just Capcom, but other makers too – can have big hits that improve the Japanese games industry as a whole.”
With Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5 due out in a relatively short amount of time, it seems that Capcom doesn't have anything to worry about, but it still needs to create new and fresh games in order for it to stand a chance against large corporations like Activision Blizzard or Electronic Arts. Hopefully, this whole developer battle will benefit the regular gamer who will have more high-quality titles to play.