Comments on: Just how relevant is Japan now, anyhow?

By: jody

jody — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:05:48 +0000

lol @ ‘thinking that we evil capitalists in the U.S. wouldn’t be able to “get” their engulfing, immersive mature storylines.’

japan is easily the most hyper-capitalist country i can imagine.

By: concaf

concaf — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:41:35 +0000

Yeah I don’t think Japan is irrelevant to the game industry at all, as has been said above, I just think their outlook on how its used is different from us, and sony japan has too much of an ego to let sony america do any of the driving. That said, the Japanese still innovate the hell out of things, the Nintendo DS and Wii being a great example of that. Not to mention popular games like that brain exerciser thing and the surgery game on the DS. The PS3 isn’t Japans’ failing, its Sony’s. The Wii showcases japanese ingenuity.

By: Gary

Gary — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:02:25 +0000

I don’t think it’s so much the idea that Japan doesn’t understand the Internet; it seems to be more at odds with how _they_ use it as opposed to Americans. Most apartments already get up to 100mbps fiber over there, for instance. We’re just more savvy with how we structure it than they are when it comes to actual implementation of apps to ride on that “series of tubes”.

That said, Japan has had a history of ignorance when it comes to the U.S.. Remember, anime only became popular stateside when Americans started dubbing fansubs, for instance, when the anime market was near nil here. Sure, they gave it a few stabs with Transformers and Voltron, but they were heavily Americanized, thinking that we evil capitalists in the U.S. wouldn’t be able to “get” their engulfing, immersive mature storylines.

By: Jack Shedd

Jack Shedd — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:43:43 +0000

I think it’s wrong to classify to all of Japan as irrelevent, or even that Japan doesn’t “get” the internet. Their culture has been more connected, for longer, than the US, and has higher broadband penetration per capita than the US.

Sony just has a history of just getting shit wrong. We talked about this back when the PSP launched, and the conflicts between Sony’s seperate divisions. I think this is specifically a Sony problem. As for your other thoughts, I think that’s a bad developer, and the army of mediocore developers are legion.

I agree, MS got the connected state correct in the 360, and a good deal of other features. That’s not specifically a US thing though? It’s just MS (and don’t get me started on that company’s history of getting shit wrong, outside of their game division). They also nailed the API with DirectX, but MS excels at APIs and always has (and DirectX has gone through 9 revisions to get this good).

The 360 is all of Microsoft’s strengths combined, while the PS3 is increasingly seeming like all of Sony’s weaknesses compbined.

Does a few company’s relative failures mark an entire country as irrelevant? I don’t think so.