Although the iPhone is carving itself a strong niche in the Japanese gaming market, its take-off has been considerably steadier than in other territories, such as Europe and the US.
A game developer round table at the CESA Developers Conference in Yokohama has been discussing the future of Japanese and Far Eastern mobile gaming, and predicts that the craze is prepped to take the Japanese mobile user by storm; with a few changes.
"I think that the current state of iPhone is similar to when DoCoMo's iMode started to become popular in Japan," Hudson Soft's Naoto Shibata suggests, reports Gamasutra.
In many respects the Japanese mobile gamer is actually further advanced, having made widespread use of connected portable devices for quite some time. This has shaped the mobile business in a different way to that presented by the iPhone and App Store, and could explain why uptake of the new device which is normally something the Japanese consumer can be counted upon to adopt earlier than most has been slow.
Also present were Capcom and Namco Bandai, who agreed that paying attention to the US and European mobile markets is vital to increasing interest natively, but also to carry aspects of the experienced Japanese mobile industry to new territories.
Though the iPhone clearly poses a difficult hurdle for Japanese companies to straddle, it's interesting that they agree the next decade is likely to belong to mobile gaming, and are preparing themselves accordingly.
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