Small in Japan
It’s the week of GDC 2013, and I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown district. Across from me, leaning forward in his chair so that I can get a better look at the tablet device he’s holding, is Japanese developer Takumi Naramura. On the display are two drawings: one of a fully combined Voltron-esque giant robot, and another where the five pieces of that robot are in disarray.
“Together, they could be strong—but they often separate themselves,” Naramura says to me. “That’s why I think they haven’t done much on the world stage.”
Those robotic felines are what Naramura sees as the five distinct pieces of the non-professional Japanese development scene: doujin games, Flash games, smartphone games, indie games, and free games. The problem, he explains, is that the situation in Japan far too often resembles that second image—and not the first.
Naramura should know, because he belongs to that very scene. As part of Japanese development house Nigoro, he’s the director, artist, and composer for La-Mulana, a retro-styled adventure game that was originally released for PCs back in 2005. Naramura also knows something about finding success in the West, as a remade version of La-Mulana became the first Japanese game to successful get approved via Steam’s Greenlight service this April.
The problem is, the rise in popularity and attention that indie developers have seen in the West hasn’t fully been felt in Japan. Even back in its home territory, the Japanese indie gaming scene hasn’t established itself in the way that other entertainment mediums such as comics or anime have. In March, Japan did finally have its first indie game-focused event, BitSummit. The footnote? It took a foreigner to get it going: Q-Games producer and former EGM editor-in-chief James Mielke.
Naramura tells me that one reason for that could be that Japanese indie developers don’t really see themselves as part of a “scene”—they’re just people who want to make and release games.
“Among the people that I know, there’s quite a few who, for example, quit their company and decide to start making a game on their own,” he explains to me. “They’re craftsmen. They just make their game, and they’re not worried about the rest.”
A few weeks later, while sitting in a cafe back in Los Angeles’ Korea Town, that sentiment is echoed to me by Enrique Galvez, CEO of Rockin’ Android–a company started back in 2008 with the intent of helping get Japanese indie games published in the West.
“When we started working with some of these developers, they didn’t see it as a business—they saw it as a hobby,” Galvez remarks. “These guys have day jobs. They get together on the weekends, or at night, and they code. And they make these wonderful games, but they aren’t looking at it from that perspective of marketing, or how many units they’re going to sell. They just want people to play it and have a great time playing these games.”
Galvez thinks that mentality is changing, slowly but surely; unfortunately, there’s still another hurdle in place. It’s one I can’t help but ask about: the attitude I’ve often sensed isn’t that many Japanese indie developers aren’t able to release their games in the West, it’s just that they don’t care about doing so. The topic of Touhou Project comes up, an immensely popular “bullet hell” shooter series created by a man known as ZUN. With so many games and so huge a fanbase in Japan, why have we seen so little official English-language representation for the Touhou series?
“Often, Japanese indie developers don’t care about the outside market; it was never an issue to a lot of these companies,” Galvez explains. “They’re content just being in Japan a lot of times. That is changing though, and we see it changing especially with the developers that we’re working with right now. ZUN himself is making some serious strides; he will be coming to America this year for conventions. He wants to see firsthand himself how this market is accepting his types of games—and I think he’s going to be shocked.”
Back in San Francisco, my hour with Naramura is coming to a close. I ask him about that tendency Japanese gaming has at times to want to cut itself off from the rest of the world, caring only to focus on itself and Japanese players.
“It’s a danger,” he replies. “Part of it comes from the language barrier; we’re a culture where we feel more comfortable with people that we can directly speak with. With games like La-Mulana, I think people like us at Nigoro are showing other Japanese developers that it’s not that hard, that it’s possible to do. Things will change—but it’ll take time.”
If You Build It, Will They Come?
“The first couple of weeks, we probably had under 15 confirmed developers at most. It was a little worrying, because I was trying to coordinate sponsors at the same time—and, of course, they wanted to know who was coming.”
BitSummit director James Mielke admits that there was a bit of nervousness in the days leading up to the event. In addition to the biggest question—would Japanese indie developers even attend, and if so, would they socialize with one another?—concerns raced over how the event would look, how crowded the location at Kyoto’s FANJ Hall would feel, and whether those who did show up would feel like it had been worth their time.
“The reality of the show was actually better than we imagined in the planning stages,” Mielke says. “During and after the show, a lot of developers started to approach me and tell me how happy they were to be part of this event, and that there had been nothing like it before in Japan—which was incredibly gratifying to hear. Now some of the developers who were initially reluctant to take part in the first BitSummit have already said they want to join us for BitSummit II.”
With Mielke’s desire for BitSummit to increase the visibility of Japan’s indie gaming scene and pave the way for new collaborations, the question isn’t whether there’ll be a BitSummit II—but how it will evolve from the event’s first outing.
“The next event won’t be a rehash of the first one,” Mielke declares. “I’ve got a lot more tricks up my sleeve.”