Atsushi Inaba on console considerations and the one winning platform

Atsushi Inaba - Image 1It’s a very human tendency to wish for something that you don’t have. Atsushi Inaba, former CEO of the now defunct Clover Studios, and the man behind such games as Okami and Viewtiful Joe, also has a wish of his own, and it has something to do with gaming platform considerations. The full article will tell you more about that, right after the jump.

Atsushi Inaba beside an Okami banner - Image 1Choices, choices, choices. All of us are bombarded with them on a daily basis. Even gaming industry folks like Atsushi Inaba are no different – his considerations involve which platforms and which target markets to develop games for.

The interesting thing to note is that Mr. Inaba is interested in developing games for both the Nintendo Wii and the DS, despite whatever misgivings he may have had about Nintendo’s motion-sensing machine. However, his staff at Platinum Games have been creating games for the Sony PS3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360, so he’s not about to drop those next-gen consoles in favor of the Wii.

The crux of the problem now lies in the different markets that that the various platforms appeal to. As of now, Inaba is very much aware of the challenges a Japanese-based company is facing by trying to appeal to a Western market while working in an uncertain context. As Inaba himself put it:

To be honest, if we’re going to consider the Western market, we should be thinking of creating a game on the 360; however, the 360 is not doing that good in Japan, and we’re a Japanese studio, so do we want to ignore Japan? And let’s think about the European market. Well, is 360 doing good there? No. So OK, what about PS3? Well, how well the PS3 is doing is still kind of vague, you don’t know where to go with PS3. Now let’s look at Wii. Wii has a huge market, but are there real game titles that are popular on Wii? And the answer is no, there are no real titles out there yet. So right now the consumer machines are in a very not-clear stage. So, to be honest, I wish that there was just one platform, one winning platform that we could concentrate on.

Inaba-san also discussed a variety of other topics, such as his history with Clover Studios, Okami and his working relationship with Capcom. If you’d like more information on these, simply follow the source link below back to the full interview.

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