New devices are levelling the playing field for games and applications in Japan, say European developers
Western firms long fumbled for the key to the treasures of Japan’s tightly locked ¥300 billion video game market. But the 2008 launch of the iPhone here seems to have pried open the market and allowed innovative application makers, both start-ups and international players, to win over pernickety Japanese gamers.
Japan’s smart phone and tablet market is still relatively small. Apple is notoriously close-lipped on sales figures (and would not divulge data on applications), but the number of iPhones in Japan is estimated at between 3 million and 5 million, and of iPads at around 500,000 units.
Yet these portable devices have turned the market dynamic on its head, says Hawken King, founder of Dadako Studios. “You used to have to get into bed with a publisher and be a trusted developer for a platform [a computer or console on which games and other applications run].
“But [publishers] took massive royalties, leaving game companies with nothing. It was a self-destructive cycle,” the Briton says. “But now we have this very accessible market place, where it only costs $100 to become a registered developer and then it’s up to you.”
Since opening its Tokyo office in 2004, France’s Gameloft has become, by its reckoning, the biggest seller of iPhone game applications on the Japanese market.
Gameloft Managing Director Alexis Gresoviac has a good idea why. “Our smart phone game applications offer the same quality as games for handheld consoles such as the DS or the PSP, but at around ¥600 they are much cheaper,” the Frenchman says.
King’s Dadako Studios, founded in January 2010, is at the other end of the size spectrum. The Briton works with a single lead programmer and outside partners on applications such as its innovative Facemakr avatar creator. Global downloads of the app were about 38,000 at the time of writing, with about one-third of sales in Japan.
Guillaume Hansali, CEO of web development and consultancy firm Wizcorp, is another European innovator who has created a bang. Wizcorp’s Ka-boom! is an application within an iPhone application.
Described by Hansali as the first social augmented-reality game, Ka-boom! is hosted in the Sekai Camera application (a camera that uses GPS to provide live data on stores, restaurants and other things around you), and involves planting virtual bombs around the world to blowup other players. The game’s website shows that bombs have been dropped across the world, including some politically sensitive areas.
Hansali believes that Westerners have a mindset better geared to application development than their Japanese counterparts.
“Japanese are very good at doing one thing and doing it deeply. This fits the model of [conventional] games; when you make a game you make it for one use, one platform, maybe one type of device,” he says. “But applications are supposed to fit on different platforms, in different languages. You have to maintain and improve them all the time, and this is something Western people are good at.”
Yet it is not all fun and games. Information Architects (iA) is a Zurich- and Tokyo-based company known for its Web Trend Map (trustworthy internet names and domains plotted on the Tokyo Metro map) and news website development. But the passion of Oliver Reichenstein, its Swiss founder, for good writing has led to iA developing Writer, a minimalist writing application for the iPad.
“Professional journalists use simple text [editors]. These programs have no formatting functions and so they feel they can concentrate more easily. They say [Microsoft] Word is too busy,” Reichenstein says. “I found that if you take away these functions, you take away a lot of the incitement for writer’s block.”
Reichenstein says that people have told him they would get an iPad even if Writer were the only application. Since going on sale on 20 October last year, the application has been selling about 500 units a day, and has been endorsed by Stephen Fry, the renowned British wit and digital enthusiast.
Tokyo-based German tech writer Serkan Toto points out three barriers to success in the Japanese market: “Language, customer support in Japanese, and distribution; i.e., once the app is released in the Japanese App Store, how can developers reach out to local media or key influencers to create a buzz to make their product stand out?”
Another challenge is getting Apple’s seal of approval. Several developers interviewed for this story described Apple as almost omnipotent in its ability to push applications.
But while Apple’s iPhone helped launch the smart phone in Japan, Google’s Android operating system is set to send it into orbit. Major mobile operators KDDI (au) and NTT DOCOMO are already installing Android as the operating system on their new smart phones.
Gameloft’s Gresoviac predicts that around 50 million phones here will operate on Android within the next couple of years. He also sees mobile applications as the future of gaming. But others disagree.
“Web applications are the future,” iA’s Reichenstein says, adding that he feels native applications (those that run on the computer’s operating system) are just a phase, and that sooner or later everything will run in browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
Hansali, however, is still weighing up the options. “We also believe in the web app. Native applications are fast, they have the best effects, the best graphics, but web apps are getting closer to them,” he says. “Do we try to get stronger on the native side, or on web applications?”