Daily Yomiuri’s Tom Baker wrote the following article on the Tokyo Game show. Here is an excerpt from the article:
The world is more impressed with Japan’s video game industry than the industry is with itself. That, at least, is the idea one could get when attending the 2008 Tokyo Game Show, held on Oct. 9-12 at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba.
The event, featuring 209 exhibiting entities and attended by more than 194,000 people over its four days, kicked off with a speech by Yoichi Wada, president and representative director of video game company Square Enix Co., who is also chairman of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, which is the main organizer of the Tokyo Game Show.
“The game industry in Japan is very fiscally fit,” Wada said, adding that Japanese video game companies probably have the best balance sheets in the world.
But he also said Japan has lost its position as the leader of the world’s video game industry.
While he suggested some “abstract” changes in the hierarchical organization of the Japanese industry, he also gave concrete reasons for Japan’s seeming decline in the field.
One is that while Japanese companies, most notably Sony and Nintendo, dominate the console-making side of the business, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii and DS consoles are facing significant U.S. competition from Microsoft’s Xbox console.
This is happening at a time when hardware makers have lost their position as the “hub of the industry,” Wada said, as the center of gravity has shifted to software.