The queues seemed to stretch forever along the crowded streets of Akihabara, Tokyo’s famed Electronic Town. Outside the biggest stores, scuffles broke out as gamers fought for favourable positions – the police were called in. It was chaos. This was March 2000, the launch of the PlayStation 2 console – the most successful games machine ever produced. The rest of the world would have to wait months for this, but back then the domestic market was the most important to Sony, as it had been to all major console manufacturers for twenty years. Japan was the epicentre of gaming; it had the console makers, the best developers and the biggest games. But over the course of the following decade things changed.

February 22, 2014. The PlayStation 4 is being launched in Japan three months after the machine’s high profile arrival in North America. There have been queues, of course, but no riot police this time, and no one is watching the sales figures for a hint of how this console may perform – it has already sold five million units elsewhere in the world. There are a couple of Japanese launch titles – gangster adventure Yakuza: Ishin and fantasy strategy sim Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends the key examples – but, apart from a new beta demo for Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn there is nothing huge. Talking about the delay, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, has said that the Japanese development industry wasn’t quite ready to support the machine, but this isn’t the whole story. It papers over something more profound. The country hasn’t been ready for years.

In 2002, Japan accounted for 50% of the global video game market. By 2010, it was at 10%. If you go back to the era of PlayStation 1 and 2, you will see it was dominated by Japanese giants like Nintendo, Sony, Capcom, Konami and Namco. The biggest games were arcade conversions – the likes of Tekken, Ridge Racer and Street Fighter – but the biggest console originals came from Japanese studios too: Super Mario, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid... These were the games everyone was excited by. The top ten best selling games of the nineties were all developed in Japan.

But in the early 2000s Western tastes began to change. The arrival of Rockstar’s seminal open-world shooter, Grand Theft III, kickstarted a whole new genre of expansive sandbox games, while the increasing popularity of first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal led to big American franchises like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty set in grittily authentic landscapes. As a whole, Japanese gamers tended to prefer fantasy adventures and hyper-stylised arcade-style shooters – they didn’t go for open-worlds, they didn’t go for cinematic naturalism. A rift was developing.



Risk factors



At the same time economic factors were working against the Japanese industry. An economic recession shrank the domestic market for console games, and hit publisher’s ability to compete in terms of development costs. The Dreamcast title Shenmue, an incredibly prescient, ambitiously sprawling adventure required a reported $70m to develop, almost ruining its publisher Sega – but in the West, among companies like Electronic Arts, Activision and Ubisoft, this would soon be a pretty standard budget. And on the other side of the financial spectrum, a very strong indie scene has developed in the US and Europe, often with the financial backing of larger publishers (there is a thriving indie scene developing in Japan, but it has largely been contained in hobbyist groups). It also seems easier for younger talent to rise into positions of prominence within larger developers whereas in Japan, a rigidly hierarchical management structure can keep fresh talent from blossoming.



By the time of the PS3 and Xbox 360, Japanese publishers were bit part players. While Nintendo was still in a dominant position thanks to the massive success of the Wii console, Capcom, Namco, Konami, Square Enix and co struggled to maintain interest in their big franchises. Some tried to Westernise the brands, often diluting the appeal in the process. The later Resident Evil and Final Fantasy titles have, in the eyes of many gamers, lost their intrinsic qualities in the bid to appeal more broadly. In 2009, Keiji Inafune, the producer behind such mammoth games as Mega Man, Onimusha and Resident Evil 4, famously stated that the Japanese development scene was finished. It was stuck in a past of traditional role-playing games and sci-fi mech battlers. It couldn’t compete.



There have been notable exceptions, of course. Plenty of them. Formed by a cabal of legendary designers and producers, Platinum Games has produced two of the finest games of the decade: Bayonetta and Vanquish; Grasshopper Manufacture retains the Japanese sense of surreal mischief with titles like No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw; Capcom has produced the enormously popular Monster Hunter series of creature capture games; and of course Nintendo is still turning its big names Mario and Zelda into beautiful gaming experiences. Perhaps most tellingly, From Software’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls titles – intricate obtuse, demanding fantasy action adventures – have garnered an obsessive following in the West despite eschewing the industry flow toward more intuitive, less challenging, gaming experiences.

Signs of life



But the industry is very different now than it was in 2000. The smartphone sector has exploded, some believe at the expense of the handheld console gaming sector (although Pokemon and Animal Crossing are still wonderful and popular). The PC scene in the West is strengthening through the dominance of the Steam platform, and the traditional console market has Activision, EA, Take Two and Ubisoft at its head. Look at the big gaming sites and the most anticipated titles of 2014 are Destiny, Titanfall, Watch Dogs, Tom Clancy’s The Division... All produced in North America. And of course there is the rise of the online massively multiplayer RPG, a genre dominated in Asia by Chinese and South Korean giants.



Japan is still there, however. Inafune’s apocalyptic comment isn’t quite accurate. Dark Souls 2, Mario Kart 8, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and new Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts titles are all looking enticing. The global fanbase is watching. Certainly, there has been a huge fall between 2000 and 2014, between dominating the industry and getting the freshest console three months after other territories (and the Xbox One hasn’t even got a Japanese release date yet). But this business has always been about trends, it is cyclical, and the next big thing could easily come out of Tokyo or Osaka. Dark Souls shows there is an appetite for the sort of challenging and cryptic titles that Japanese publishers excel at. And there are new routes to market that cut out the repressive strata of traditional publishers. Last year, Infanune, the developer who criticised the staid Japanese industry, turned to Kickstarter to fund his new project Mighty No 9, and achieved his target in a matter of hours. Sony is supporting indie-minded development in Japan, funding offbeat titles like Tokyo Jungle and Rain with young teams and fresh ideas. Companies like Playism and Nyu Media are helping to get brilliant Japanese indie titles like La Mulana and Gigantic army to the west; boutique western publishers like Rising Star and Rice Digital are cherry picking the best local fighting games, JRPGs and shoot-’em-ups. There is masses of activity bubbling under the surface.

So the late launch of the PS4 tells us one story about the Japanese games industry, but it doesn’t provide a full-stop or a signal of unstoppable decline. The British industry has suffered a huge fall from grace in recent years, as major publishers have pulled out, shutting studios in their wake. But it has clambered back, not just with high profile releases like GTA V, Batman and Forza Horizon, but with cool interesting indie projects. Japan is doing the same, perhaps. Veteran gamers know that from Metroid to Herzog Zwei to Resident Evil to Metal Gear to Killer7 to Dance Dance Revolution to Demon’s Souls, Japan has led industry thinking on design and mechanics; it has innovated, it has invented new genres with style and flourish and purity of vision. It is now playing catch up again, but it is a skilful player. Maybe PlayStation 4, with its more open publishing platform, its easy welcome to smaller studios, its global digital distribution, will be a major part of that process.

• Tekken over – Japan’s gaming future