I am a pretty casual player. But I was pretty damn good at Alpha 3. Less casual back then.
We're not banking on MH to revive sales in Japan. The first one won't help with that, and the second one will be coming at a time, when PS4 should already be doing better than now. It's nice and all, but the truth is, it was expected that the first year was going to be tough. The market trend in Japan is pretty straight forward, and it's pretty obvious how things were going to go. The big title that everyone was really hoping on was FFXV, but that's had its fair share of problems. Beyond the first year, things have taken a little longer than expected. Back in 2013, SCEJ/A approached a lot of developers/publishers like Square Enix, CC2, Level-5, BN, Sega etc.
The idea was to provide funding, or incentives, and help mitigate risk, in an effort to build a solid foundation. Some were obviously more welcoming, and others had a little bit of their own ideas. The issue here is that some of these approaches would've been better made a little earlier, because there's only so much resource, and it's taken a while to get going, because no one is sitting on their hands. The companies have their plans, and you have to work together to get things going. On a more positive note, the Dragon Quest discussions back then turned into something really meaningful, so that's going to be a series of titles that should help a good amount. Beyond that, because developers like CC2 and Level-5 are pretty eager to get notable projects done on current gen, it's been a case of fitting things in with them at the appropriate time. They could end up as pretty key players, depending on how things go. Level-5 is soon to announce the first of its projects, which should hopefully do well in Japan, but also worldwide. Then when we have CC2, Sega, and the others slowly coming through, so we should be able to build some consistency. Obviously, there's Japan Studio, Sony's own, who are pretty ready to show off their next games soon. PS4's price cut, and positioning with all these titles should help too.
The larger problem here is that you can't really fight against the market changing over there. The most you can do is build something worthwhile for yourself. And to build the necessary momentum has taken longer than expected, since bigger titles means longer time, which also means positioning can be difficult.
I think the worst is behind us now in that market. Moving forward, there should be a good few titles that will be coming consistently to help make more of a difference, but I don't expect fortune to change a great deal. Nonetheless, it'll be a lot better than now. It's kind of a struggle, but it's early days. We've a long way to go yet. I think of 2014/2015 as transitional years in Japan. 2016, we start hopefully reaping the rewards, and things start looking more positive than before since a lot of projects will start getting announced and released.
Also, bear in mind, that game development takes a long time. First, a title has to be discussed, and objectives set, then you head into the actual development, which takes many years. So while there may have been developers excited, it's tough taking the first step. Look at the western side. It's not that different. So much stuff has been delayed. Delayed, and then delayed again. In certain cases, you have titles being pushed back which causes marketing and positioning issues with other titles because they're encroaching. Uncharted and Ratchet are doing that right now. It is what it is, but things are getting a lot better. It's teething issues.
Once games start rolling out, it's not like anyone is really going to remember a lot of this. Most people focus on the present. They forget the past quickly.
