Having said that, after Nakamura criticized the star producer system in the Japanese cultural industry on the Internet according to what he heard, he pointed the root of such a problem directly to the depths of Japanese social rules! For example, in the Japanese game industry, they particularly like to package and create so-called "star producers". It has become their routine to give the credit and glory of a successful game to a star producer and then make that person the signature of the series. This is very different from the Western game industry that emphasizes collective efforts and the overall brand of the studio. In Europe and the United States, it is difficult to imagine that a game can be a hit just because of a certain producer's name, but in Japanese games, names such as "Shigeru Miyamoto", "Hideo Kojima" and "Yuji Horii" themselves are guarantees of sales. Unlike "celebrity spokesmen" who build publicity for their products, the appeal of these Japanese gold medal game producers is indeed real - largely due to their gaming styles that fascinate players. But the key to this strong style often comes from an unfortunate system: dictatorship.
From Ghibli Animation Studio to Nintendo Game Development Department, most modern Japanese companies still follow the strict hierarchical system that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. The system of suppressing people at the government level and the tradition of command supremacy determine that these "producers" or "supervisors" have absolute on-site control. The rest of the staff are extensions of the dictator¡¯s hands and cog-wheels that bring his ideas to fruition. Admiral Yang from "Yin Ying" once said: "The worst democracy is better than the best dictatorship." But for game development or other collective commercial art creation activities. "Dictatorship" in certain situations is not necessarily bad. The biggest advantage of game development that takes the producer's own ideas as the absolute core is that it is easy to create a "whole feel" and "features".
For example, "Ninja Dragon 2" has extremely high operational requirements for players, and "MGS" has unique elements and unlimited spoof easter eggs. The in-depth game system and data design of "Royal Knights", the tactical freedom and the essence of battlefield terrain use of "Resident Evil", or the abnormal difficulty of "Super Demon World Village" that is dedicated to torturing players and its corresponding Wonderful and addictive These "features" are actually the result of some kind of paranoia. They do not compromise with the "best route" pointed by market analysis, abandon the popular route and only win the recognition of some players. Advantages and risks coexist. Undoubtedly, this is difficult to achieve in a "democratic" team that values ??perfection.
In contrast, Westerners advocate "brainstorming" where everyone is equal - this process will undoubtedly lead to the birth of many excellent ideas. But often, in order to respect every good opinion, they will be adopted in full. The result of mixing individual good ideas together may not be good. If done well, it may be a masterpiece like "GTA5" with all the details. But it¡¯s more likely to turn into a featureless bowl of sludge. ¡ª¡ªJust like our "five-nut mooncake" joke, every one of the five kernels is obviously delicious. But when they come together, that's not the case. In recent years, the reason why some European and American games give people the impression that they are all the same is largely due to their excessive pursuit of market trends but lack of some "personality" that symbolizes the game style. And creating this kind of personality is the charm of "dictatorship".
But on the other hand, the dictatorship system certainly has a more fatal flaw: once the dictator is brought to power by a mediocre person with insufficient achievements, This will lead to the embarrassing situation of a raging group of soldiers, and may even destroy the series' signature. The consequences of a producer suddenly resigning are also very serious. The game is likely to change so badly that players cannot agree with the sequel style. After some game producers leave, the game style suddenly changes, which can only make players curse! It is actually impossible to judge which one is better, democracy or dictatorship. However, the current situation in Japan's cultural industry is not caused by a simple dictatorship! There are also big problems in Japanese society itself!
What problems does Japanese society have? The main problem is Galapagosization! What is the Galapagos? in short. It is a small archipelago far away from the mainland. Because of the good climate, it has formed its own ecological environment without interacting with mainland creatures. It evolved on its own for a long time and finally turned into a very weird creature. These creatures may be well suited to the environment of the Galapagos, but they are completely unsuited to surviving somewhere like the mainland! In short, freaks! When I was a classmate of Darwin, it was because after arriving in the Galapagos, I discovered that the creatures here were all kinds of weird. Only then did he slowly think of the theory of evolution!
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? With a population of more than 100 million, it cannot be called a small country in the world - as long as it is not compared with China and India! After all, the United States only has 300 million people. After all, none of the countries in Britain, France, and Germany has a population of over 100 million. Aren¡¯t these countries big countries? So in fact, in a country like Japan, it is normal for their companies to first meet domestic needs. Just because Japan is an island country, and thenThere is not as much investment in Europe as the UK, and it is not like the UK has a tradition of integrating into Europe to cause trouble, so Japan has always been outside the Asian continent, even after they called for leaving Asia and joining Europe, that is even more difficult. Think of yourself as an Asian country. In such a situation, they have directly ignored the Asian market, or there is no market in Asia that they can pay attention to. In addition, they mainly meet domestic needs, which has become a unique driving force for evolution!
When they were invincible in the early years, Japanese companies were blindly arrogant and believed that sustainable profits could be ensured by continuous improvement of existing technologies, which directly led to high-quality and high-price products. However, the business model and consumer habits have changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years. At the same time, the b2c business has also changed. Many end products are reduced to assembled goods, and the technical threshold has dropped significantly. At this time, Japanese companies faced a choice, but in the end they underestimated the strength of their competitors and the intensity of the market trend, and failed to give up their old thinking. When the yen appreciated sharply in the early years, Japanese companies were unwilling to move their production bases overseas. At that time, it was difficult for Japanese products to find rivals, and most developing countries were still fragile. This judgment was not inappropriate. During the best period of transformation, which was the beginning of the century, Japanese companies were once resurrected in the dot-com bubble, and then were deeply troubled by the economic depression. Therefore, while looking forward to recovery, it strategically prioritizes saving the domestic market and misses the best opportunity to take root overseas.
In the early years, no one could have imagined that emerging markets would become so huge. Japanese companies underestimated the growth rate of income in developing countries and did not tailor cheap products for them. Then they copy their domestic strategies for marketing. This strategy can only win over a very small number of wealthy people, and fails to generate a brand effect among the public. When competitors arrive, there will be no first-mover advantage. And there will definitely be some discomfort with this. After all, every country has its own characteristics. KFC entered China and started selling rice bowls! The Japanese definitely can't do this kind of thing! So when this Japanese product enters other countries. He always seems very arrogant and stubborn and doesn't know how to adapt!
Japan¡¯s consumer market is the most mature in the world, and there are many competitors in the same market. Because companies set excessively high break-even points during the early economic boom, small manufacturers are almost unprofitable when demand drops. However, due to the corporate culture's reluctance to give up, the necessary research and development expenditures to cater to consumers cannot be omitted. There are many hard-working supporters, making the industry's profit margin very low. At any time, Japanese home appliance companies are extremely dependent on the local market. If the local market cannot generate cash flow, it will lose capital for expansion. Underestimating the inconspicuous opponents, these opponents do not have the worries of Japanese companies that cannot lose their tail. They started from 0 and went on the upward channel but went smoothly.
Among all these problems, Japanese companies still have one biggest problem. That is fear of change! The corporate rules in Japan emphasize a "collective leadership". They are a group of old guys who have served the company for decades and gradually became directors. Entering the board of directors begins to influence the direction of the company. In Japan, there are very few companies where a dictator leads the company and controls the direction of the company. Basically, a group of board members meet together to discuss what to do. And in such a situation, coupled with the cautious characteristics of the Japanese, it becomes a wrangling meeting - no one dares to say that the company should start taking a completely different new path, otherwise wouldn't they have to bear the responsibility? What if it fails? And oftentimes no one is willing to take the risk. But others don't let him take risks! In Japan's board of directors, it is not the minority that obeys the majority. That's a veto system! Even if almost everyone agrees with a person's opinion, as long as one director objects, then such a thing will not be passed! In this way, the decision-making of this Japanese company will appear to be too prudent!
?Then the problem becomes that Japanese companies don¡¯t know how to adapt. Even if they find that the world has changed, they don¡¯t know how to deal with it. They can only stupidly continue to use the previous methods! The same is true in the cultural industry. If a super powerful producer did not come out to break everyone's veto power, it would be impossible for any product with a very obvious personality to appear! But after having such a strong leader, the direction of the entire group is fixed, and basically no one will challenge the authority of such a person! So this creates a dilemma. If there are no star producers, then many times the products will be the same as those on the market today, becoming more and more powerful and lazier, just relying on the simplest and most useless Brainy ways to make money! And if there is a star producer, then this star producer can bring products full of strong personal style to the industry. This strong personal style may be good or bad.
The current comics and game industries are performing well, but in the animation industry, especially in the TV animation circle that Miyazaki Hayao is not involved in, because there are no well-known producers, many of the animations produced now have been Started to take the symbolic route. Some yandere girls, some tsundere girls, all of them are like making machines.?First set up various functions, and then design the image a little bit, and a group of characters will come out. Then, I'll think about the plot like I'm patting my head, and then I'll put it into place, and that's almost it! Apart from attracting some otakus who watch animation all day long and don¡¯t go out to work, who else would like the animation produced in this way? Then these animation producers just rely on targeting such a growing market of otakus, and they don¡¯t want to make progress! Maybe they are afraid of change, maybe they feel they don¡¯t have the ability to stand up and make very personal animations while still being successful. So in order to evade responsibility, they make money by making some animation that has long been proven to be feasible in the market!
It can be said that Nakamura revealed these things according to the instructions he received. That really "stuck a hornet's nest" all of a sudden, and it really hit the g point of netizens in a forum like 2ch! Every netizen suddenly became excited. Some people are calling a person like Nakamura a "non-national," which is equivalent to what the Chinese mean by "traitor" or "traitor." Others express their confusion as to why Nakamura thinks those practices are wrong - they think that they will work and live in Japan for the rest of their lives and will never go to foreign countries, so there is no need to learn foreign languages. Since they can do this personally, how can Japan Can't companies just target the Japanese market? It is said that Japan has more than 100 million people, and it is enough to survive just by relying on the Japanese domestic market! It can be said that this kind of person has the same idea as the criticized animator! It can be said that even the enterprising spirit is almost gone! There are even people out there. It came with a mentality similar to "self-abuse", and the comment was "This is what Japan is like. There is no hope!"
In response to the various reactions, Nakamura did not respond to them one by one as required by the news. First of all, let¡¯s not talk about the effect of the responses. Just responding one by one is too much! In this short period of time, there were dozens or hundreds of comments. Is it possible to come back? On the other hand, even if you come back, you can't convince others with just one or two sentences. It may take you a long time or even a day to debate with someone, which is different from dozens of people in just a short time. Hundreds of replies are being debated. Should that day still be passed? So in such a matter, Nakamura still escaped with one blow! After losing such an analysis, the man ran away again and stopped responding!
Such a speech. That caused an uproar on the 2ch forum. Although Japanese people do not go online too often, this kind of uproar on the Internet only spread among otaku circles and did not spread to the real media. But the response is really big enough. It can be said that 70% to 80% of Japanese otakus suddenly knew about this, and they all went online to read such a post! The result was that in a short period of time, this post reached 1,000 views and was subsequently blocked. Then various otakus opened new posts in the forum to discuss such a matter, so to speak within a short period of time. A post like this from Nakamura has become the most popular post in this 2ch!
And at such a time. Although Nakamura escaped with one blow, he was still paying attention to such a post. He was always ready to follow the requirements after hearing the news. When the heat was almost the same, he would start the next step! A few days later, seeing that this craze was about to die down, Nakamura came out again and prepared to act according to the requirements of the news! What's going on this time? It can be said that this operation is not like the previous ones that were purely foreshadowing. At this time, Nakamura finally wanted to follow the requirements of the news and leak a little clue!
He posted another post, and in this post, he claimed that he was a light novel author. He had always guessed the content of other authors¡¯ books with perfect accuracy. That was purely because of his genius! And as for him, he has long been very dissatisfied with Japan being such a backwater! What he has to do now is to write a novel in which no one can guess what his next plot will be, and it will also make such a novel very attractive! All in all, it is a very interesting but unpredictable novel. The publication of such a novel will definitely surprise these otakus! But after submitting such a novel to Kadokawa Shoten, the people at Kadokawa Shoten didn¡¯t agree with it at all! The editor even told him not to write such weird things, but to just follow the rules and write according to the general situation! As long as it has some cute girls and some random plot, otakus will pay for it! The key is that the publishing house will help him contact a good artist and get some illustrations of beautiful girls. It doesn't matter whether the story itself is good or not!
When such a post came out, it really shocked 2ch! how? It turns out that the person who posted this is a light novel author? Why are you dissatisfied with Japan being a backwater? Is this going to happen? And what does the so-called editor mean? ?Are we otakus so easy to fool in the eyes of editors? Who is this so-called light novel writer who speaks like this? Suddenly, such a series of topics caused the most extensive discussion on 2ch! It can be said that in other sections of the forum, almost no one was discussing other topics. Accounts that had been registered before but had not visited the forum many times were revived one by one to come up for discussion. There were also a large number of newly registered accounts coming to discuss. It can be said that this can definitely become something like the first Internet Otaku Summit Forum!
What are they going to do after hearing the news? It's very simple. First arouse everyone's curiosity, first attract people's attention through various sensational remarks, and then slowly draw everyone's attention to our novel This step by step will not be able to get people's attention. Has the otaku been seduced? (To be continued)