Originally posted by Team Andromeda
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It's when Japanese publishers started pandering to the Western markets that game design suffered. You ended up with strange Eastern-Western hybrid games that hardly anyone liked.
Of course, the rise in Western gaming with the PS2 generation onwards did lead to Japanese publishers panicking and trying to find ways to appeal to gamers in the West who weren't as interested in Japanese games as they once were.
I think that sort of thing has calmed down over recent years though, with Japanese designers now more focused on staying true to their sensibilities. But I'm not sure if Japanese gaming will ever be a huge thing in Western markets again. Well.. not to the extent of how it was in the 80s and 90s when Japan really did rule the world of gaming -- and quite rightly so.
Another important point is -- Western developers gradually learned how to make truly fun, polished games. They learned a lot from Japanese game design. By the PS2 era, you were seeing Western devs delivering far more professional products that could easily stand proud next to the best from Japan. So you ended with games that had a very Western design ethos but with the polished quality you'd expect from a top Japanese publisher. This led to Western devs becoming extremely popular and well respected, which took the focus away from Japanese gaming. Gamers in the West then decided that they tended to prefer what Western devs were delivering.
You will always have Japanese games that appeal to a worldwide audience, but the days of Japanese publisher domination are long gone.
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