Platinum Games äußerten sich zu Nextgen und die Schwierigkeiten, die Xbox in Japan hat:
Kamiya über Nextgen:
To offer another perspective, the first game I actually directed was
Resident Evil 2 on PlayStation. Just a year ago Capcom’s remake released and when I played through that there were so many surprises. The door loading issue is gone and the game is obviously so much prettier. Also, zombies can now climb in from other rooms, which is something I couldn’t do back then.
Seeing that, I realised there are things that I always wanted to do but maybe technical limitations were holding me back. The remake made me realise that we’re tearing down these walls with new hardware, so I think it will be easier for me to challenge more interesting game design in the future, which is something I look for.
During our career in the games industry, we’ve gone through PlayStation 1, 2, 3, 4 and now 5. We’ve seen a lot of different generations come and go at this point and with each one we always get a whole lot of talk about what you’ll be able to do. Of course, it’s exciting and of course, I welcome those new changes, but from experience, every time I’ve gotten my hands on new hardware I always find new walls to run in to. I’m looking forward to
PlayStation 5 and
Xbox Series X, but they might not solve everything.
Kamiya über Xbox:
I don’t know if I’m really fit to give advice on how somebody should run their platform since only some of my games have sold well. But if I were to share my innocent opinion as a gamer, I would say that ever since the Xbox has been introduced to the Japanese market it’s always felt like something foreign and far away. It doesn’t feel like it’s ever been cultivated for Japanese tastes.
It reminds me of the NES and Super NES days when I had to go to these really niche game stores to get foreign games you could only get through import. They weren’t localised to Japan or anything, they were just imports that you were kind of buying just to have this rare token as a gamer.
I think that
Microsoft Japan could do more to market towards actual Japanese gamers’ tastes for their console. If you want a concrete example, when you unlock an Achievement it says ‘Achievement unlocked’ and in Japanese, this phrase is translated extremely literally. Compare that with
Sony’s Trophies: that idea is very easy to grasp and even in Japanese the word ‘trophy’ is the same as in English. There’s no awkward translation and it’s easy to understand.
Achievements have been part of Xbox since the 360 days and we’ve just come to expect it at this point, but it’s something that when I really think about it, doesn’t really have any meaning in Japanese. I feel like that could have been localised better. I think maybe someone should tell
Phil Spencer that the Japanese translation for Achievement is a little literal [laughs].
Inaba über Xbox:
We love Phil Spencer by the way! We’re not trying to speak badly about him.
I agree with the foreign feeling nature of the hardware, but I also admire that Phil wants to try hard in Japan. I would love to give him some advice, but I also feel that the success route into Japan has not always been about having the best hardware. Sometimes it’s about familiarity. The biggest exception is the iPhone, but that was able to break in because it just took the world over – and it’s not easy to make something of that momentum every day. It’s a tough question that I don’t know the answer to.
I did read some rumours about Xbox wanting to purchase PlatinumGames, and I thought, ‘people on the internet write the craziest stuff’, because that conversation has not come to our doorstep at all. That said, we’re not Microsoft, so we don’t know what happens behind their doors, we don’t know if they had any thoughts about it possibly.
We’ve not had any talks like that, but I think even if it was a possibility, we’re now going into more independent self-publishing. It’s not that we’re disinterested in Microsoft, but if the relationship were to be us working under their direction, I feel like that would be the opposite of what we’re trying to do now and limit our possibilities. Any opportunities that would limit our freedom I think we would be against.
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