Past Glories

At Tokyo Game Show 2017, Japan’s game developers seem more interested in reprising the past than pushing things forward

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Private sales of nuclear fallout bunkers have, in recent months, reached their highest levels yet in Japan. Such is the level of national anxiety of being almost-neighbours to a North Korean megalomaniac who routinely plunges test rockets into the Sea Of Japan. Still, the existential dread that accompanies this kind of international sabre-rattling (not to mention the last shoe-soaking downpours of a lingering monsoon) only slightly dampened the atmosphere of this year’s Tokyo Game Show, which still managed to lure a quarter of a million visitors to its cavernous, gloomy venue, the Makuhari Messe convention centre. Here, on the bleak industrial outskirts of the city, a little over 600 companies, including a clutch of international indie developers, showed up. As in recent years, however, many of the big hitters, from Nintendo to EA, from Activision to Ubisoft, were conspicuous by their absence. In fact, there were 200 fewer games on display compared to last year, when 1,523 games made the journey to the show floor.

These shrinking numbers are, surely, a function of the diminishing role that these thundering shows play in the business of promoting and selling videogames at a time when a well-promoted tweet or precision-placed YouTube advertisement can shove a game in front of far many more eyes than any stand in a deafening, reeking exhibition centre. During TGS week the founder of one of Japan’s highest-profile PR agencies quietly admitted that he now advises smaller developers against booking space at the show. Far better, he said, to spend the money on a social-media campaign, where the competition may be equally stiff, but the potential audience is many magnitudes greater.