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NEWS: Bloomberg Report: NetEase Plans to Close Visions of Mana Developer Ouka Studios

The previously unreported moves to cut back staff and spending in Japan follow years of investment in the world’s No. 3 gaming market, with not much to show for it. China’s two dominant game publishers sought to escape a stagnating home market by making a series of bets in Japan from 2020 onward, looking to incubate the next great entertainment hits to bring back home.

In one of the more prominent deals, Tencent in 2023 secured the rights to develop and publish the mobile edition of Bandai’s Blue Protocol, which it hoped to build into a franchise. But this week, its Japanese partner said it will end support for the game in 2025.

Shenzhen-based Tencent, the world’s biggest games distributor, has been frustrated by its interactions with Japanese developers, in part because of a mismatch in ambition between the Chinese firm and local partners, the people said. Local creators are adept at smaller-scale, lower-risk projects, whereas Tencent went to Japan in search of tentpole franchises to take global, one of the people said. Since late last year, Tencent has been setting higher goals and expectations when offering money to studios, according to the people.

"We may be approaching a point where Tencent and NetEase begin to scrutinize their returns more closely,” Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu said. "Globally, the video gaming industry has retrenched post-COVID, and many large publishers have reduced headcount or scaled back investments. Anecdotally, the Japanese developers’ desire to tightly control what can be done with their IP (intellectual property) has sometimes been a source of friction.”

NetEase has been cutting staff at Ouka for a while, since this spring at least.

Japanese console gaming in China is dead after Black Myth released. You're going to see alot more big budget console games from China now.

I have noticed an increase in both Chinese and Korean games doing well and just plain being more interesting and fun to play. I feel like Japanese games are focusing more and more on appealing to the west which is diluting what I used to love about them. There's still some good Japanese games coming out but I find it a bit hard to get excited for much these days. Seeing the ever-increasing reliance on ports and remakes of older games (which are 99% of the time worse versions than just simply playing the original) really indicates to me how either the talent just isn't there anymore or the industry itself is struggling.

Hideaki Itsuno also recently left Capcom which I feel is a good move and I hope whatever new project he's working on is more interesting than what Capcom has been putting out.

Maybe 'the west' has shaped Japanese devs and projects a little bit, like how something like Monster Hunter was streamlined quite a bit with World, which arguably was the first game to really try and push out of its little niche it resided in before, especially in the west, but I personally don't think that's a bad thing.

Also I don't see why getting ports and remasters for old games is a sign that the industry is struggling. Especially since there is actually a demand for the ports and remasters. And since you've brought up Capcom the reason why they ported the Apollo Justice Trilogy was because there was an ACTUAL demand for them to port/remaster the games. Especially since it's now impossible for us to legally buy them, IE Duel Destinies and Spirit of Justice, on the 3DS with the eshop dead.

It does seem that China is realizing that Japanese studios want more control with the franchises they created rather than just giving carte blanche to external devs. Concentrating on local talent in a growing scene was probably eventually going to happen, but I raise my brow at one game (that has had a reception of "yeah, it's alright") is going to bring in some explosion of Chinese development