Beating the Market: An Interview with Keiichi Yano on Gamasutra

Gamasutra has an interesting article up today with Keiichi Yano, creator and co-founder of iNiS, the company best known for their addictive DS game Elite Beat Agents (or Ouendan for the purists in the audience!). Yano discusses the odd nature of creating a crossover title, one that has a following in both America and Europe despite being developed with the Japanese in mind.

Elite Beat Agents was for Europe and North America, and the Ouendan series is for Japan. They’re the same game, essentially, but with very different graphics and song choices.

There are very few games that perform globally. You look at what Capcom’s doing right now — Devil May Cry is a global title, but Lost Planet is very obviously a Western-targeted title, even though it’s developed in Japan. This also goes with Western developers wanting to sell their games in Japan: do you think that people are going to have to radically change a game’s face to appeal globally?

KY: Well, I think it really depends on the game. I think the more that you take time to build a very detailed universe, you think — there might be some things that you need to do. On the same token, you have to think that… for example, movies. Western movies come to Japan all the time. They’re major hits, and all they do is subtitle them. I think going out, as we get away from the deficiencies of the boxes that we’re confined to, and we go to more mainstream ways of telling our stories, I think that’ll be less and less of a problem. Just going back to the community thing — that’ll be something that I think will start being very universal. Like with our titles — a lot of people wanted to play the Japanese songs.

On the same token, Elite Beat Agents actually did pretty well in Japan, because they sell Elite Beat Agents in some mainstream stores.

The article spans 4 pages and continues with discussions onthe music game market, the consoles and their online offerings and a number of questions about the nature of the global game market for Japanese developers.

Source: Gamasutra