While at Microsoft, one of my responsibilities was oversight of the Japanese market. A fascinating country and culture, I thoroughly enjoyed my time over there. It is the cradle of our industry, and despite some recent ups and downs in the fortunes of Japanese developers and publishers, some of the most creative content in games still emanates from Tokyo and Kyoto.
Having said that, one of the frustrations of being an American company attempting to do business in Japan is the insularity of the industry that defends locally-made content and looks down on games from abroad. I appreciate this is a unique culture that has very different tastes in entertainment. But while western movies and music can be extremely popular with younger consumers, foreign-developed games (or yoge, as they are called) have an extremely difficult time breaking through with Japanese gamers. This has frustrated American and European publishers for decades.
In the past, we've pointed to things like genre preferences, game play mechanics and character art as issues in breaking through in this culture. But with simulation sports games, these issues would seem much less relevant - it's typically about the gameplay. So you can imagine my disappointment every year as we struggle to break through in Japan with our outstanding FIFA franchise (which, I should point out, is a game made by developers from more than 20 different countries, including Japan). This year's tour de force has been universally-acclaimed as the best iteration ever in the long history of the franchise, garnering a number of perfect scores from reviewers and averaging a metacritic score of 91. So imagine my delight to see Famitsu award the game a platinum rating (36/40), a score only enjoyed by the cream of the crop of games released in Japan. That score obviously caught soccer gamers eyes over there, as the game debuted in the top 10 this week, much to our delight.
Having said all of that, it is clear we still have work to do in Japan to more fully understand what drives that gamers attraction to sports titles. Let me be clear on this. I recognize that there are many factors that contribute to a gamer's decision to purchase (or not) a particular game, I'd just hate for the gamers in Japan to not get as much enjoyment as the rest of the world out of the best sports game of this console generation. Also, we'll continue to do our part to try to better understand the Japanese consumer - with market research, focus groups with gamers of all ages, and feedback sessions with journalists - and continue to improve on the best soccer game in the world.
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