Spot On: Beating the odds, Tokyo-style

TOKYO--Creating games is expensive--and only growing more so--and funding game development is increasingly challenging. That’s one point on which most game industry professionals agree. In the current age of 100-person development teams and multi-million dollar budgets, how can the smaller companies compete? For one Japanese game company the answer is: find new markets, both overseas and domestically, and target a niche.

Taiyou Sonoe (pictured, in center), Fukiko Sato (at right), and Kumiko Ota (left) of Japan’s http://www.karin-e.jpKarin Entertainment took some time out from working on their most recent game, http://www.karin-e.jp/animamundhi/anima_e/00_freamset.htmAnima Mundi: Dark Alchemist to explain how their company stays competitive. One key: for this game, they have their eyes on the U.S. market. Although this is nothing new for a Japanese game developer, Karin Entertainment’s focus on a very specific niche sets them apart, as does the high level of priority assigned to localization.

In their words, “the fantasy fan market in the U.S. is very attractive, so we’re doing development and localization simultaneously for this game. We plan to launch it in North America in late 2004, one month after its Japanese launch.”

To target the widest possible market, the game will be released in two formats: DVD-PG, an interactive DVD format that allows the game to be played on a standard DVD player, and a PC version. Overseas distribution is a potential stumbling block for any company, so Karin is working with a partner that already knows the U.S. market: Hirameki International Group, a company that focuses on importing Japanese pop culture products like anime and games to the U.S.

With dark themes and lush artwork, the game itself is designed to appeal to what the Karin staff describe as the “maniac” or “otaku” audience in both Japan and North America. Anima Mundi: Dark Alchemist is an RPG with a “Gothic horror” setting and a decidedly adult story line. The protagonist’s younger sister is involved in a bizarre accident that destroys her body while leaving her head still alive. The player, as the dark alchemist of the title, must create a new body to which he can reattach his sister’s head. Narrative tension comes from the conflict between the protagonist’s noble goal--helping his sister regain her life--and the unsavory means by which he must achieve it. For instance, at one point he has to find a source for corpses, which he needs as raw materials for his sister’s new body. During the game, the player will constantly confront the question “how far will you go?”

RPGs are a natural choice for smaller developers, because they don’t require the heavy programming investment needed for other genres like and FPS or driving title. Though he doesn’t reveal the budget for Anima Mundi, Sonoe comments that small Japanese developers typically produce RPGs for the equivalent of $50,000 to $100,000, and that sales for hit indy titles hover around 50,000 units. Like mass-market titles, these indy games are usually priced at 6,800 yen (about $64), which means that a hit game can recoup more than 30 times its development cost.

As is often the case among smaller-sized development studios, many work only on one project at a time, effectively betting the company on the success of each game. Given the potential payoff and the difficulty of simultaneously financing more than one project, the popularity of this approach is easy to understand. But Karin Entertainment does things a little differently. While working on Anima Mundi, a large project that will take more than a year, the company also creates http://www.vanillas.jp/02_design/01_flash/flash_main02.htmFlash mini-games used in online promotions.

To differentiate those general-audience Flash games from its other products, the company develops them under a different name: http://www.vanillas.jpVanilla Sugar Studio. Clients for these games include Japanese fashion magazines and Web portals--companies that seek a very different audience from the hardcore gamers that Anima Mundi targets. Of course, doing these smaller games can help keep the company going while it works on long-term projects, but Sato believes they have another benefit that may be equally important: “I’ve worked at other game companies where they only developed products for the otaku market, and the games just got more and more extreme. Doing online promotions help us stay balanced.”