China’s success contrasts with failed efforts in old media. If any country is now winning the race, it is China, which produced six of last year’s top 20 mobile games, including two of the top three: Tencent’s “Honor of Kings” and miHoYo’s “Genshin Impact”. ![]() Krafton, a big Korean developer, is working on a game adaptation of “The Bird That Drinks Tears”, a series of novels based on Korean mythology. Many of its games mimic Japanese style, but that is changing. South Korea has become the emerging new power, encouraged by a government that declared games part of the Hallyu, or Korean cultural wave, that includes K-pop music and such movies as the Oscar-winning “Parasite”. The game made $800m in Japan last year, but has yet to be released elsewhere. In “Uma Musume” (“Horse Girl”), the world’s ninth-highest-earning mobile game of 2022, the player trains young women to compete in races. Japan is also held back by a large domestic market with a culture that others can find baffling. Whereas the global movie business is still dominated by America (which produced 17 of last year’s 20 highest-grossing films, with China making the other three), the games business is international: last year’s 20 highest-grossing mobile games came from nine different countries. The production of games is also more varied. But gaming has shifted to mobile, and the two main operating systems, Google’s Android and Apple’s i OS, are American-owned. Sony and Nintendo still have a lead in consoles. ![]() Western developers found it easier to write games for the Xbox’s Windows-based system. Microsoft’s Xbox gave America a share of the console market. Japanese games have a greater emphasis than Western ones on co-operative play, and less on firearms, says Mr Hirabayashi, who talks of a culture of “the katana, not the gun”.īut Japan’s grip is now weaker. The “loot box”, a now-ubiquitous monetisation feature allowing players to buy a package of random power-ups, is derived from the Japanese market for gacha, vending machines that sell surprise toys. Some ideas are stylistic: the two-dimensional artwork in games such as the “Pokémon” series follows a Japanese tradition which Hirabayashi Hisakazu, a writer on gaming, traces to the artwork of the Heian period. Unlike Japanese consumer-electronic successes, notes Matt Alt, author of “Pure Invention”, a book on Japanese culture, games represented not just efficient manufacturing but “a triumph of ideas”. More American children recognised Mario than Mickey Mouse. The university’s Centre for Game Studies, stacked with 10,000 video games and 150 pieces of hardware, shows how Japan led the gaming market by the 1990s, with Nintendo, Sega and later Sony dominant. Japan’s anime cartoons had a niche following, but gaming was the cultural export “that would really monetise and become an influential cultural phenomenon,” says Nakamura Akinori of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. ![]() Japan conquered Western living rooms in the 1980s when Atari, an American game pioneer, collapsed and Nintendo saw an opening. And unlike movies, in which America remains the world’s only superpower, the contest in gaming is wide open. ![]() As games take up a bigger share of people’s time, they become a weapon in the battle of ideas. A new soft power is now on the rise: Super Mario diplomacy. Every movie reel exported was an American ambassador, he said, dubbing this “Donald Duck diplomacy”. In 1950 Walter Wanger, an American producer, said film exports were more important “than the H bomb”. Popular culture’s “soft power” has been evident ever since Hollywood began.
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