Did weebs win in the end? A decade ago...

Did weebs win in the end? A decade ago, everyone said Jap games were going extinct as western AAA titles dominated the sales. Now we have a Japanese title that has outsold Horizon, Halo, Battlefield, Ass Creed and so on with a fraction of the budget.

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at the cost of them being more Western than ever.

Elden Ring is pure Japanese game. Cope.

Elden Ring is the least creative, most derivate and Western game from has made, and it's also by far their most successful. Says a lot, really.

Yes. The 7th and early 8th gen were fucking awful for Japanese:
>struggling with HD development (struggled to create proprietary engines, poor or zero Japanese documentation for ready-bake engines like UE3)
>exponentially rising cost of AAA games (Western industry creating a graphicwhore arms race)
>chased cancerous Western design trends that blew up in their face (e.g. Capcom under Inafune)
There's a reason a lot of quality Japanese devs either stuck exclusively to cheaper handheld development, shut down altogether, or struggled massively on consoles and pumped out AAA games with massive compromises (e.g. DMC4, MGS4, FFXIII).

It wasn't until the mid/late 8th gen did we start to see a real major resurgence of Japanese development on consoles, mainly thanks to the consoles being easier to develop for, studios figuring out good internal engine solutions (e.g. RE-engine), and UE4 being easy to use with proper Japanese documentation.

Meanwhile the Western industry continued to gone further down the rabbithole of just chasing profit above artistic integrity: All the major Western AAAs (Ubisoft, EA, Activsion, and TakeTwo) pump out AAA games with budgets so large they're designed-by-committee to be as safe as possible and appeal to the largest demographics possible. And within the past 7~ years with an added skinner box, service-game design philosophies. If Western devs aren't chasing that normiebux they're usually just copying the Naughty Dog 'cinematic 3rd person shooter' formula because it's the vidya equivalent of Oscar-bait and both developers and journalists want vidya to desperately be taken serious as "art".

Meanwhile Japan has continued to make actual fucking video games with good design philosophies, usually driven by a single director. Hence the quality gap.

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>Makes things up
>This says a lot, really!
Many such cases.

Does anyone know mid sized AA Japanese game dev teams haven't been pushed out of the market by AAA behemoths like in the West? I would guess the japanese game industry is doing pretty well financially, so why hasn't it been completely dominated by AAA yet? It must have something to do with japanese economic policy.

Nintendo already did that

The need for every company to make gigabillions is an American concept, smaller Japanese game companies are happy making enough profit to stay in business.

>It's a Japanese game
>It has attractive women
>It has difficult gameplay
>It has minimal handholding
>It has outdated graphics carried by strong art direction
>It sells ten million copies, completely demolishing the narrative game "journalists" have been pushing for years that every game needs to be dumbed down and made more accessible to appeal to a wider audience and all the characters have to be ugly so they don't offend snow flakes, all while crying about how Japan is behind the times

Even though I think the game is highly flawed I still fucking love that things turned out like this.

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Well, the domination of AAA happens naturally in a competitive market economy when the industry is doing well financially. If some games make way more money than others, game dev costs go up and big producers won't finance that make less money. Putting cultural differences aside, there must also be a difference in how the two economies work.

Platinum, sorta? Even they're being propped up constantly, and are moving to GAS shit and mobile games for fucking China.

I think this more analogous with how Obsidian needed to work on side products like World of Tanks to avoid going underwater. Japan doesn't really have AAA. It could be something as simple as Japan having a worse economy than the US.

Remember before that when the same people said conventional gaming was going extinct because mobile games were so much more popular and accessible

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I didn't make anything up. Everything I said is clear to everyone who's not a drone.

I remember when people thought the Wii would be the future of gaming.

>Japan doesn't really have AAA
The big projects from Capcom, Namco, Square Enix, Fromsoft, and Nintendo are unquestionably AAA

This, everything about Elden Ring is exceedingly Japanese. Even Gurrrr's addition had zero effect on the narrative.

japan didn't really do much, it's just that american gaming collapsed on its own

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>Square Enix
a good reminder for my fellow weebs that japan still regularly releases polished turds

Way of the Samurai 5 when?

I don't know how big From is but their games don't feel AAA at all. Their animations are very simple, almost crude. Dark Souls 1 feels like something from the ps2 era.

Even if most Japanese AAAs have singular directors and aren't design-by-comittee doesn't mean they're good visions.

Square Enix just ruins into retarded development issues constantly

I find it difficult to believe Fromsoft has anything other than a AA staff. Despite their recent meteoric rise they have historically been a tiny studio and all they work with are one or two games at a time.

>most derivate and Western game
Trannies on Any Forums claim this, but I've never actually seen a western rpg with proper medival maximilian armour inspired armorsets. In western rpg it's all American football gear with spikes and Pauldrons.

It's all a spectrum. Fromsoft's games are definitely AAA past Demon's Souls, but they're on the lower end in terms of budget compared to AAA shitfests from the West with $500m budgets.

I'm more interested in having a discussion about where From goes from here if I'm being honest. When will they attempt to push a flagship title that doesn't stand on Souls DNA and how will that do? Is that what the rumored Armored Core game is going to be?