So, we’re in the second year of an ongoing wave of layoffs in the video game industry. If you paid attention to a broader level something like this has also been happening in the tech industry as a whole, but for video games, it’s meant hundreds of very talented and valuable people losing their jobs.
Something that’s been coming up online is the sentiment that Japan isn’t the same as the West in this regard. In fact, we reported last month that Capcom decided to raise salaries for their workers. That salary increase was actually intended to bring them in line with the higher salaries found in other Japanese game companies, like Konami, Square Enix, and Nintendo.
It’s not that all Japanese game companies are doing well, as we had reported Jim Ryan also had people laid off in Japan as part of the PlayStation layoffs. But there is definitely something else going on in Japan that isn’t going on in the US or Europe, if not most of the world. So why is Japan different?
As revealed in this new report from Japan Times, Japanese game companies do have some aces that those in other companies don’t. The big factor seems to be the “robust domestic gaming market,” which reflects on how long Japan has been making and selling video games, even just for themselves.
Another factor mentioned is the Japanese mobile video game market. As Dr. Serkan Toto explains:
“In Japan you have a whole ecosystem of purely mobile-first and mobile-only game companies.”
Presumably, Japan’s mobile market is also particularly robust in itself, as they have persevered facing competition with mobile games and apps from the West, and also faced the same post pandemic difficulties the rest of the world did.
As for the higher salaries, that reflects on the particular boom period these game companies are enjoying right now. Gamers from abroad may have thought they were just rewarding their hardworking developers. In fact, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, and others are competing for top Japanese talent within their industry.
Japanese companies in general try to keep their employees for longer, and so they try to instill company loyalty with them. And there’s a lot of other cultural connotations to this practice, but what we should know is that it isn’t that things are easier for game developers in Japan.
In fact, it’s more likely that once the games industry recovers from the circumstances that forced this wave of layoffs to happen, the likes of Bethesda and Rockstar Games will also compete for talent by offering top salaries and generous benefits.
But we don’t know just how much longer this layoff wave will keep going, or, if we should be considered that this is part of broader trends of things changing in the game industry in general. We certainly hope the industry around the world finds its recovery sooner rather than later.
