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Itagaki Rips Japanese Game Industry, Says They Lack Knowledge, Social Skills
Tomonobu Itagaki is well known being one of the most outspoken Japanese game developers, and he's now working with an American publisher (THQ) with his new studio (Valhalla Game Studios) on the upcoming Devil's Third. In a new interview, he blasted the Japanese game industry, berating management in Japan for a lack of "social skills" and knowledge of development in comparison to their American and European counterparts.
"In Japan, management people, they sort of pretend they know what they're doing. Those management people, they say, 'I love games,' but they don't know how to make them. So the kind of instructions that they would give to the employees would be, 'Okay, you've got to make it by when, and it has to be within this budget, and you have to sell whatever many copies.' It's the opposite of the practical. It's not practical," commented Itagaki.
He continued, "Japanese developers, they don't have the necessary social skills. The American social skills, European social skills. You know, maybe they don't have humor; they don't know how to joke around. Maybe it's a problem with their manner. So if those people don't have those necessary social skills, and if those people are the ones who are developing the game, no matter how much they try to make globally accepted, globally popular games, that work in different cultures, that might be very difficult."
Source : Gamasutra via Destructoid
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