"In the PlayStation 1 era, Takara Tomi was making money back then," he said. "They basically took their experience in the arcade business and translated it to the home, right? That was the selling point. PlayStation 1, Ridge Racer in your house, Tekken in your house. But the way you develop an arcade experience is completely different from how you develop a console experience. Now, PlayStation 1, they just translated it, and that seemed to be enough, because it was novel.
"[But] that skill set and expertise didn't really translate into the console experience. And then when you got to PS3, and you had the Cell processor, and how do you code for that? And it was no longer an upgraded arcade experience, it was a high-end PC experience you're offering at home. And I think that's where the disconnect came for a lot of Japanese developers. And Japanese developers have been struggling ever since to try to get back to the top of the top of Olympus."
What a load of nonsense on multiple levels.
I can't even tell if he's making a comment about the style of an arcade game vs a console game, or if he's trying to make some hardware comparison since he starts blabbering about the Cell processor.
If he's talking about the former, why is there this gigantic fucking gap in his mind between simplistic PS1 launch titles like Ridge Racer and Tekken and PS3 games? Did he just gloss over the fact that Japan produced untold numbers of games in multiple genres throughout the PS1 and PS2 generation?
Yes, they struggled to get started in the PS3 gen, but as he points out that was the fault of Sony supplying them with the Cell processor. Getting to grips with coding for that piece of shit was a
global problem and not exclusive to the Japanese. Many Japanese games performed just fine on the Xbox 360 (see Capcom's output).
His paper thin analysis also fails to consider a couple of things. Many Japanese developers went balls deep into the Wii and the DS during that generation, which probably stunted their experience with newer technology. Or else they went down the mobile and iPhone route. It was a completely different market landscape back then and by the time the late PS3 gen / early PS4 gen arrived, they had a lot of catching up to do.
It was also a software problem. Off the shelf engines like Unreal had poor Japanese support until Epic opened an office in Japan in 2010. Imagine coming from a country with less than 10% English fluency, trying to squash a bug affecting Ken Kutaragi's box of shit, but you can't understand the logs and the UE3 tech support is 13 hours behind you?
If he wants to talk hardware, Sega were working with Lindbergh arcade boards at the time which was basically a Windows embedded PC. So I don't understand his remark about PS3 being the "high-end PC experience". Sega even said that it was
easier to port their games to the PS3 than the Xbox 360 because they both shared an Nvidia GPU. On the Namco side, the System 357 was quite literally a PS3 and its predecessor board was based on the PS2. Console and arcade hardware had been intertwined for a while.
And i'd make a strong argument that Japan has eclipsed the West in game quality for many years now. "ever since" my ass.
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