‘It revived the market’
You might know Kadokawa as the 60-plus-year-old Japanese firm who’s produced all sorts of various bits of manga, but there’s also a publisher arm called Kadokawa Games that has been steadily pumping out titles like Demon Gaze and Natural Doctrine over the years. Given their experience in pretty much every platform on the planet they know a thing or two about the market, and just recently credited the Switch with helping it out of a slump.
Speaking to DualShockers, company president Yoshimi Yasuda managed to explain the gaming landscape from his perspective. After noting that the relationship between the [Xbox platform and developers isn’t in the best conditions,” he says that his team is excited about the prospect of working more on Steam, but that the Switch is really their passion platform right now.
Yasuda explains, “I’ve been working here for fifteen years, and I always watched these two companies and held relationships with them. I think the users really care about these platforms, and the quality of their products surely helped the market. I think that the release of the Switch absolutely had a positive influence on the market. It revived the market because now it’s full of good products. At the end of the day, it’s all about good games.”
To further back up the role of consoles in an ever-encroaching mobile market, Yasuda drops this nugget of wisdom: “Even with the same amount of active users, mobile games made high revenues mainly selling items via the gacha system. This was obviously interesting, but the value of the market will decrease”
It’ll be interesting to watch Kadokawa’s impact on gaming as a whole as they continue to grow.
President Discusses Strategy JRPGs, the Japanese Gaming Industry, and More [DualShockers via Nintendo Life]
