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2009: "Our game industry is finished."
2010: "...everyone’s making awful games; Japan is at least five years behind."
2011: "... people just aren't hungry enough any longer... there needs to be something that gets that feeling back."
2012: "Time is running out and we should have realized this when I made that bold statement a few years ago."
Keiji Inafune has settled into his role as the doomsayer of the Japanese industry. Since quitting his role as the head of Capcom's R&D in 2010, he's struck out on his own, forming three companies in 2011 alone.
Comcept is devoted to developing new IP; Intercept is more of a traditional game developer, and DiNG -- which is so new that it hasn't yet been reported in the Western press -- is to focus on the goldmine that is social and mobile games. It booted up in mid-December.
But what does Inafune really plan to do? Does he feel comfortable with his role as the main critic of the Japanee industry from within? Can he really run three companies at once? Gamasutra sat down with Inafune at this month's Game Developers Conference to try and get some answers to these questions.
We also wanted to find out what's up with his announced 3DS game King of Pirates (turns out he can't talk about it much at the moment -- beside that "it's starting to shape up to be a really awesome game" -- but he did confirm it has a publishing deal).
In the end, Inafune has to prove himself all over again now that he's cut ties with Capcom. Can he do it? His words suggest, at the least, that he is determined to do so.
Has starting your own company been easier, harder, or about the same as you expected?
Keiji Inafune: So, it was a lot harder than I first imagined, but in the background, there's just been so much fun to be had from starting my own company that even though it was a lot harder than I imagined, it was totally worth doing.
Why is it broken up into two companies? I've read things you've said about it, but can you really explain to me why you have two companies?
 KI: [laughs] So, I feel that you don't need to just have one company. You can have many companies, and they can kind of put all their troops onto whatever their focus is.
I've got Intercept, of course, which focuses more on the game production side. And I recently created a third company [DiNG] that focuses more on mobile and social. And I've got Comcept.
There are a lot of different things that I want to do, and I don't feel just focusing all of that energy in one company is going to be enough. I need to put that in different directions, in different companies.
Can you actually manage all three of them effectively as one person?
KI: When I was the head of R&D at Capcom, I was in charge of 900 people. Now with these three companies, all of the staff added up, it's around 30 people, so yes. Easy task.
[laughs] Yeah, but it's tackling very different things. It's not so much the number of people; it's the things you're tackling, particularly moving in new spaces. I know you're working on social and mobile, at the same time you're working on traditional console games. It's a lot to handle.
KI: So, yeah. I only appear that way -- that I'm doing a lot of new things that I've never done before, and that I'm branching out in so many directions that it could be hard to imagine. But that's totally not the case. When I worked at Capcom, I was in charge of arcade, mobile, I was in charge of kids' games and regular console games. What I'm doing hasn't really changed. You know, I was spread just as thin at Capcom, but still I was able to do it very easily. So, it's not too different from what I did at Capcom, what I'm doing right now.
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I think its a good thing that Gamasutra keeps close ties with some of the best in the industry even when no one else is.
Now hopefully Inafune will indeed be able to show the japanese sector a more effective way of how to get things done.
After the metascores of Ninja Gaiden 3, RE:Operation Raccoon City and Armored Core V we've talked about what's wrong with the Japanese game industry, but as well with the one in Germany. Seems it's almost the same. Monetization and copycatting are more important than original game mechanics and prototyping. There seems to be no more space for Innovation and Creativity for the major Developers and Publishers.
What some small studios could have done with the money that those two titles had cost ... gosh, it aches!
And the problem as a whole is that there's nothing new. Interest in the game industry has been raising tremendously but 'nothing' has changed. To just allow that to remain leads to loss of interest followed by a collapse.
No one is inventing, and David has nailed it on the head.
This is particularly bad for an industry that is dwarfed exponentially by the constantly reinvented technology it is using.
I'm not particularly big on this constant need for "innovation" or "invention", but it does have it's place of importance. Nintendo stepped it up because they knew they had a problem. Continuing to simply compete for the same audience would lead to stagnation and eventual destruction. So they gambled (seriously, they gambled HARD) with a completely untapped market and struck big. HUGE, even. Now, there's a larger focus on a casual market as a whole with Move and Kinect walking into the areas of motion control that the Wii couldn't. But that's only on the tech end. Simply relying on the latest console, graphics engine, or apple product to drive our creativity is terrible. If we keep that up the first successes on the platforms will dictate all the genres and tropes of the market, and we'll be flooded with copycat syndrome again.
But Inafune's level of change is really on the management end of our industry. How do we as developers make games? One of his problems at Capcom is how it took so long just to push an idea out. He's a seasoned developer at Capcom and it takes him MONTHS of approval time. Imagine the new starters of the industry who have less experience. They probably never get heard from for years. By the time you DO have any say, the next wave of hardware might be coming out. Now, you've got to flow with the tide of changes that generation brings whether it's a new level of control, a new method of feedback, or a completely new market that your company wants to focus on. It's a system that can bottleneck creativity.
Inafune is working with a group of people differently than how he did at Capcom: Having staff working at positions that they wouldn't have until they were at least a decade more experienced, more focus on creative development and its directed vision than monetization methods, and an rapid-decision process. The innovation doesn't lie necessarily in the games, but in how they are developed. The kicker is that this isn't even new. It's just the perks and freedoms of indie development! Indie devs are praised consistently for their ability to add new and different ideas quickly as opposed to many of those AAA studios we point to because they have specific markets to target. Inafune wants to push out more creativity into the industry, so it's not a surprise that this is how he's doing it.
innovation is more than having a new fancier machine that does the same exact thing as its predecessor and I believe that's where the japanese game industry and what inafune is attacking . Not the machines or hardware but the mindset and development process of japanese games. As David Asksys why can't we have several badass games a year? why do we have to be subjected to a large number of uninteresting and cliche titles before the occasional demon souls comes out which is both uncompromising in its design and a new model as far as gameplay mechanics and implementation are concerned ?
I'm not convinced there'd be an increase in masterworks though, because even in the days of 1 year dev time, 5 man teams there were very few really good games. I'll take Mortal Kombat (1992) as an example. It was a game who's style (digitized sprites) that lots of other developers tried to copy, but just couldn't nail. By the time MK3 came out they were waaay ahead of anyone else in the field. Metroid was just as innovative, and by the time Super Metroid came out, many developers were making simple run and gun shooters with different weapons. What I'm saying is that the best games of each generation are really difficult to make, even in small teams.
I love how he wants to make a game that is just his pure idea. Not for the customers, not for the money, simply out of a love and passion for making games. Bravo, Inafune-san, Bravo
Unfortunately that question was not asked. But it's still true. The only public effort he's got so far is the basest form of the thing he is railing against.
"The big difference is those companies don't have Keiji Inafune working for them... Right now, all of these concepts, basically, they come from me."
That comes off as egotistical and frankly crass. It sets him up as apparently the only way Japanese games can not "suck." It's also totally at odds with his complaint that the "young guys" aren't getting chances. Combined they make a really straightforward complaint of "young guys aren't thinking like me!" which is the most stereotypical "conservative old man" complaint imaginable.