SCE producer opens window on the Japanese market

SAN JOSE--Sony Computer Entertainment's Ryoichi Hasegawa knows international. He got his start localizing games at Sega, and in 1998 he moved to Sony, where he helped bring Jak and Daxter and Sly Cooper to the Japanese market. Today, Hasegawa drew on that experience in his GDC lecture in which he described the Japanese game market and shared his suggestions for Western developers interested in doing business there. Hasegawa's key point was that although Japanese software sales are declining, recent experience shows there is opportunity for Western games--at least for companies that are willing to invest in intelligently preparing their products for the market.

Hasegawa began with a brief discussion of Japan's game-rating body CERO. Broadly similar to the ESRB, CERO is a government-sanctioned nonprofit organization that has four ratings for games, from "approved for all ages" to "over 18 only," the equivalent of a US "M" rating. He noted that one key difference between CERO and the ESRB is in attitudes toward firearms. Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando's guns earned the game a "Teen (13+)" rating in the US, but in Japan, it was approved for all ages.

Hasegawa then turned his attention to the current state of the Japanese market. According to Hasegawa, Japan's game industry is facing two critical challenges. First, a declining birth rate means that the traditional market for games--children and teens--is shrinking. Second, mobile games are capturing a larger share of entertainment spending. Though these games can't offer gameplay comparable to console games, their portability makes them a popular choice for a country where most of the population commutes on public transportation. Moreover, market saturation makes selling games even more challenging. In November 2003, more than 50 new console games were launched.

On a brighter note, the ratio of Western-made games has increased over the last three years. According to Hasegawa, only one Western game was in the top 100 titles for 2001, but this figure increased to three in 2002 and four in 2003. As the youth market shrinks, the adult market becomes more attractive, and he suggests that creating "mature and novel" offerings that appeal to these buyers may be a strong point of Western games.

Hasegawa singled out two games in particular. Both GTA3 and Medal of Honor have sold more than 300,000 units in Japan. Hasegawa mentioned a couple of reasons for this success. Capcom explicitly targeted a mature audience by putting GTA3 kiosks in nightclubs--rather than game shops--leading to a "cool, edgy, and mature image" that was very successful in driving sales. He also noted that the artwork appealed to finicky Japanese consumers, which is always a challenge for Western games.

Similarly, Medal of Honor also had a mature theme that drove its popularity among adult gamers. High production values, especially high-quality sound effects, also played a role.

In closing, Hasegawa gave a few specific suggestions to US developers targeting the Japanese market. Difficulty adjustment is a key issue, and Hasegawa thinks that dynamic difficulty adjustment is a plus for games sold in Japan. Good navigation, either with maps or with in-game guides, is also a must. Sony's experiments have shown that Japanese gamers are more prone to motion sickness than Western gamers, so camera controls need to be tuned to account for this. Finally, Japanese consumers are very sensitive to the background and setup for characters. They want them to have an interesting story, with bad habits and even past traumas. In this day and age, just a name and country of origin doesn't cut it, according to Hasegawa. But GTA3 has paved the way--so take these factors into account, and your game could follow.