captainsnoop:

i hope the Western AAA game industry takes notice of the success of games like the Souls Series, Monster Hunter World, and Yakuza 0 and realizes that they don’t have to spend seven billion dollars and focus test a game in to the ground in order for it to sell

like, look at any GOTY list for 2017. most of the games on the list are probably mid-to-high budget singleplayer only Japanese games with weird, unrefined menu systems and “just okay but not spectacular” graphics.

like shit man, we’re only in February 2018 and we’ve already got a GOTY candidate in the form on Monster Hunter World. Monster Hunter is like the codifying series for the “weird, unrefined, but still fun Japanese game.” MHW’s graphics are good but not amazing, the menus (while an improvement over past games) require a youtube video to explain, and the systems are so poorly explained that I’m still discovering new basic functions like 30 hours in. there’s clipping errors everywhere and animations will bug out in very “video game” ways. 

but guess what? the game’s doing fucking amazing worldwide because it’s weird and different and youtubers are going apeshit producing monhun world content.

the exact same thing happened with Yakuza last year. that game is super videogamey with passable graphics and super weird menus and systems that aren’t explained well and it did really well based on word of mouth and youtube hype.  

you see, western AAA game industry? you can make a game without spending an ungodly amount of money focus testing shit in to the ground and making sure that every hair on darth vader’s ass is rendered perfectly. people will like it despite its flaws if the game is worth putting time in to.