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The story
A post on 5ch’s hardware/industry board (“Geha”) claiming that Japan’s console game development power has fallen behind the West, China, and Korea to “4th place” sparked heated debate.
The thread saw opinions split over whether multiplatform Western developers or Nintendo hold the real technical edge, how Chinese games’ character designs stack up, and counterarguments citing Japan’s track record of GOTY (Game of the Year) wins.
What people said
Maybe it's because Japan kept churning out nothing but kiddie JRPGs?
The lost 20 years.
At the end of the day, studios doing multiplatform releases and optimizing for each platform individually are the ones actually ahead.
No matter how good your multiplatform optimization is, it's meaningless if the game itself isn't fun.
"Development power" isn't just raw technical skill.
Isn't Nintendo actually ahead precisely because it doesn't have to bother with multiplatform releases?
No idea about HoYoverse, but that FE claim has to be a lie.
It's crap.
Well sure, if you're a creep whose brain's been polluted by panty-shot otaku bait characters from China, of course you'd think that.
That's not the point.
Isn't it simply that they made cool, cute characters with a Black-inspired motif — and this is a jab at political correctness?
>cool, cute characters
Forget political correctness, the problem is that's just not true.
EA posted huge losses and got bought out, and Ubisoft's on the verge of bankruptcy.
Soaring semiconductor prices are stalling hardware specs, so spec-dependent games are going to have a rough time going forward too.
GTA might end up being the last big fireworks show.
Well, honestly China and Korea are basically under the Microsoft empire's umbrella anyway.
As long as you control the PC OS and platform, you can make anything work.
Even Tencent is half like a global (European) company at this point, and the money behind that kind of investment ultimately traces back to the West anyway.
If they ever started rolling out their own independent OS, that'd be a real turning point.
But that edges into military-industrial territory, and mess with that and you're basically talking about war lol
Looking down on indies like that is the wrong mindset to begin with.
Out of countless creators out there, the ones with real talent don't necessarily come from the big publishers.
Of course the cream of the indie crop is more fun than a mediocre AAA game.
Japan's the one that's been coasting on assuming it was better than everyone else and doing nothing about it.
This is genuinely something to worry about.
Even at that robot sports day sprint race, the Chinese-made robot blasted through the finish line faster than Usain Bolt, while the Japanese one waddled along at a crawl lol
Though the Chinese one did come with the punchline of not being able to stop and slamming into the wall (cushion), exploding into flames lol
Japan can't even make a decent action game these days.
Oh yeah? Then name me an action game on the level of Sekiro.
Stellar Blade and the new HoYoverse title get tons of comments.
Japanese games barely get any.
That's the reality of the world stage.
The new Mega Man is dominating there, actually.
Stellar Blade isn't even news anymore so it barely gets comments, and the new HoYoverse game barely even comes up as a topic, you idiot.
This time around there just wasn't much of anything generating buzz overall.
At most the trailers are only pulling 100k views.
Last time stuff like Resident Evil blew past a million views instantly.
This can't go on! There's no time for Sony and Nintendo to be fighting each other.
Like I care about some half-dead Western-game wannabe that Japanese developers fled from.
Though it's Sony that keeps courting and funding more and more Chinese free-to-play games…
For the West, China, and Korea, I can't think of anything likely to get nominated.
Crimson Desert flopped too.
Action: Resident Evil Requiem
Adventure: Ocarina of Time Remake
Family: Pokémon
Racing: Forza Horizon 6
Simulation: FE: Bansen Senkō
Multiplayer: Gears of War: E-Day
Well, China isn't exhibiting any games this year anyway.
Nintendo fanboys ("butas") like to downplay GOTY, but it's an award that makes creators worldwide go "damn, I wish I'd made that game," so it's extremely important.
If you're going to argue GOTY matters, then the country with the most wins is Japan — so what about China and Korea, who've never won it once?
Even Black Myth: Wukong, released in a weak year, couldn't take home GOTY, which flatly contradicts this thread's whole premise of hyping up Chinese and Korean games as amazing.
Isn't it just a watered-down knockoff of Metaphor: ReFantazio?
Though I do have to admire the nerve, considering how hard they trashed Palworld over its design direction alone.
What exactly does it have in common with Metaphor, specifically?
The balance and direction of putting out good-looking characters while still dodging political-correctness backlash.
That's it?
If that's the best you could come up with after really racking your brain, this isn't even worth discussing.
Background and Key Points
Japan built the modern console industry — Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Capcom effectively created it — and for most of the 1980s-2000s it was assumed Japanese studios set the technical and creative bar. “Geha” (ゲーム版, the hardware/industry sales board on 5ch) is where sales-number and industry-decline arguments like this recur constantly. The Game Awards (TGA), referenced repeatedly in the thread, is the closest thing gaming has to an Oscars ceremony, and its Game of the Year has gone to Japanese-developed titles (Zelda, Elden Ring, and others in recent years) more often than to any other single country — which is the basis for the “Japan has the most GOTY wins” counterargument. Meanwhile China’s HoYoverse (Genshin Impact) and Black Myth: Wukong, and Korea’s Pearl Abyss (Crimson Desert), represent a genuinely new tier of well-funded, internationally visible studios, while Western publishers like EA and Ubisoft have hit real financial trouble.
The thread didn’t actually converge on China/Korea being ahead — it split on what “development power” even measures. One camp treated it as raw technical/optimization skill (multiplatform studios juggling different hardware specs), another as Nintendo’s ability to design great games within a deliberately low-spec, single-platform box, and a third treated GOTY tallies and character-design taste (Fire Emblem vs HoYoverse) as the real scoreboard — three incompatible metrics being argued past each other.
What’s easy to miss: several posters noted China and Korea’s output leans heavily on Microsoft’s Windows/Xbox ecosystem and Western capital (including Tencent’s European holdings), meaning the “4th place” framing may really be measuring a Western-platform advantage rather than a Chinese or Korean one — a point raised but never resolved in the thread.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “[Console Game Development Power] Japan Has Somehow Fallen to 4th Place, Behind the West, China, and Korea.”
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