Recently, I was asked if I thought the Japanese gaming industry was stronger than its American counterpart. Five years ago, without hesitation, I would have said Japan was stronger, but this time around I was stopped in my tracks. It struck me that Japan's gaming industry and markets have begun to stagnate somehow and that it's been a slow, creeping process that not enough people have noticed until now.

Five years ago, the original PlayStation was at its peak. It appealed to a remarkably wide range of consumers and had a healthy number of female players causing sales for games such as Doko Demo Issho ("together, wherever you are") and PaRappa the Rapper to sell bucket loads. The PlayStation's design was "cute" and user-friendly; it had two big round clearly marked buttons and would sit happily in the corner of your living room, exuding "play me" overtures. Everyone and their mum had one here in Japan.

Three years ago, in swaggered the highly-anticipated "PlayStation 2," black and mean-looking... "cool"... "cold". Sit it in the corner of your living room and it exerted its presence in an overbearing bad-attitude kind of manner, just daring you to switch it on and play a game or watch a movie. Innocent young girls ran screaming from its bad-boy ugliness. Mothers made the sign of the cross and rolled their eyes in disbelief. And it sold bucket loads. To teenage lads.

Sony, which had been making games for a largely mixed market until then suddenly found its sure hits becoming sure flops. Titles such as PaRappa 2, Genshi no Kotoba, Checkit TV, Segare Ijiri 2, and many others all did dismally in this new hardcore gamer PlayStation 2 market. On the other hand, "Adult-lad"-oriented titles such as Shin Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors), Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and Devil May Cry did wondrously well. Most studios that did well in the PS1 era slowly crumbled to dust as the light users retired their old PlayStations to the attic without ever "upgrading" to the PS2.

This series of events caused a lot of bad debts and livelihoods to be lost. It also destroyed the trust between a lot of publishers and developers, making the publishers wary to risk investing in new ideas anymore. This, unfortunately, has caused the market to close up in on itself even more, becoming ultimately hardcore in nature.

But this is not the only problem. The other problem is an aging population of programmers in Japan, many of which were programming arcade machines in the 80s and have trouble with the concept of C++, never mind some of the more advanced 3D techniques and math used in games these days. These guys can't be used to teach the younger up-and-coming programmers because many of them are so hard-wired in their ways they won't embrace the new concepts in game development that are around today.

So, wanna-be games programmers are forced to learn at an increasingly wide-ranging selection of games development specialist schools. Most of what they learn there is a load of rubbish taught by professors who have never developed even a single game - they probably haven't even played a game for the past ten years either. Two years later they emerge with a smidgen of C++ and some very rudimentary 3D knowledge that would have been appropriate maybe seven or eight years ago, on a Game Boy.

Developers in Japan need to begin trying to rectify this problem, and soon. If they don't start soon there isn't going to be a pool of skilled engineers for the next generation of developers to pull from, and Japanese developers are going to have to start employing increasingly from abroad. The industry's workforce is quickly becoming highly specialized and Japan needs to set up the infrastructure to nurture that kind of talent.

So how do we begin doing this? We need to forget our closed-door corporate policies and let our programmers out to cross-polinate and hold seminars at events such as CEDEC (the Japanese equivalent of the Game Developers Conference). Programmers need to start being more vocal on Japanese developer newsgroups and learn that sharing and helping each other, regardless of the company they are working for, benefits all companies alike. This kind of comradery has been seen to work during PS2 development on the SCEE and SCEA developer newsgroups, and the base technical level of all PS2 programmers improved as a result.

Both of the above problems in the Japanese gaming industry are difficult and require time and effort to fix, but I always believe in tomorrow, and I think a lot of other people are just now beginning to realize that things can still be done before the bottom really does fall out. Fingers crossed - we've a long way to go.

- Dylan Cuthbert
Co-Founder, Q-Games Ltd.
Kyoto, Japan