West vs East - who has better developers?

Any would do.

I do not find it that easy to state.

Perhaps I would state that the West on average creates the better games on average, yet they rarely hit a real high, and it is rare they get a real low. So The West to me produces something that I would consider "always worth it, but rarely gamechanging"

The East is way more hit or miss, they have produced ALOT of favorite games over the years, but they have also made the most disapointing.

And then you can even break it Down to genres.

Which would be around this genrewise:

RPG: West

FPS: West

RTS: West

Platformers: East

Beat'em'up: East

Hack & Slash: East

Character Fighting games: East

TPS: Undecided

Adventure games: West

Games that does not qualify to a genre: East

Not so easy for be to simply pick one.

Does the West even make games anymore?

Why do you separate JRPG and Pokemon? Pokemon is a JRPG.

Also, consider that Nintendo are often regarded as the best developer. So in one sense, Japan has the "best" developer (e.g they won best developer at The Game Awards this year). But if you're talking "on average", then that's still up for discussion. I wouldn't write it off as quickly as you did.

Gaming is going to shit mostly due to the user base having a voice these days. You guys can only blame yourselves.

no u

I personally find East-West frame outdated, politically incorrect (because the whole concept stems from 19th century imperialism), and meaningless in this day and age. Hell, there is no "East" when gamers talk about East vs. West. It's basically Japan vs. everyone else. Not only is that downplaying other so-called "Eastern developers", it's also downplaying the difference between East European developers and American developers.

And where does Australia fit in? What about Russia?

In the end, there are good games and bad games.

Developers from america are, on average, so far ahead its silly. theres a few exceptions, crytek being a notable one for example, but overall its really not close. i should note im speaking from a technical perspective.

I defiantly prefer Eastern games. They are far more varied and unique... Plus they far more fun

West, by far. I remember the days when Japan dominated.

West just plain has more so its really not a fair comparison

I don't really care and it really doesn't matter.... Both the east and west make a large variety of games.

Consider how the vast majority of games that come from the west are fucking awful, the east wins by far.

Dead Rising 3 was made in Canada and he just gave two examples of excellent Japanese action games. Why am I even replying to you you're a complete moron.

Let me edit your post so it's closer to reality today:

I would have been more willing to included those games.... about 10 years ago.

"b...b...bu....but donkey kong guys!"

The east is (still) far ahead of anything the west can muster.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune, Eiji Aonuma, Yu Suzuki, Koji Igarashi, Gunpei Yokoi, Hideo Kojima, Suda51, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Masahiro Sakurai, Tetsuya Takahashi... yeah, it's not even close.

I've always preferred Japanese games. I grew up mainly playing consoles, and if you weren't playing Japanese games on consoles, you were mostly playing shit.

Even these days my favorite games tend to be Japanese games. Though I will admit that the playing field has changed drastically in the past decade. I think that on average, western developers are far ahead of the east now. However, I still feel the best of the best developers are Japanese. It's like most of the Japan development scene is in the gutter now, but when they do deliver, they really fucking deliver.

This is an extreme generalization, but the East makes more of my favorite games. Especially when we take Nintendo into account, they rarely put out anything that is nothing short of high quality. I think since most of us here are western, we get more western games. But accounting for quality and not quantity, I think the East takes it, and by a LONG shot. Just look at 2014 alone.

Eastern developers by far. Game design, western developers, game design. Unless you're Blizzard. Blizzard is the shit 4real.

Examples of eastern developers: Konami, Platinum, FromSoftware, Nintendo, Dimps, Hexadrive, Capcom, Namco (Bandai), Sega ....

Cave, Treasure, G.Rev...

I can go on, and I can support my claims. These devs design games - games that are challenging and well thought out.

This year's Donkey Kong game was great, and the Souls games are terrible. Every franchise I listed has had a recent entry that has been outstanding.

Ha.... ha... Oh man you're good.

I have played both. Have you?

Best developers of all time? The East, by a wide margin. Most critics' lists and audience polls of the greatest games of all time are almost always dominated by Japanese developers.

Best developers today? The West, by a narrow margin. Most of the quality games coming out today are from Western developers, but when it comes to the cream of the crop, top Eastern developers are still on-par with top Western developers.

West by a mile, they make up most PC classics.

i would say east, western gamers only play shooters

i enjoy both

It fluctuates between the two frequently. Right now, overall, I'd definitely say the best games are coming from Eastern developers. Nintendo, Platinum, FROM, and Kojima come to mind.

Stupid comparison 2 continents vs small island

Speaking of Australia, other than LA Noire, what games are made from there? I thought Ukraine, Czech Rep., and Poland made more games than Australia.

It's not that stupid, though. The games coming out of Japan tend to look and play quite a bit differently than the games from the west. It's only stupid if you try to make some "look at the number of games on Metacritic" argument that ignores that there are just a lot more games made in the west.

While I wouldn't exactly call it "stupid", he has a point. We're basically comparing two entire continents (North America and Europe) with 1.1 billion people against a small island with 126 million people. It's a very lop-sided comparison. I doubt most of these East vs. West comparisons have anything to do with other Eastern nations like China, Korea or Russia (which all have their own distinct gaming cultures).

However, using Metacritic as a measuring yardstick for such a comparison, that's just silly. Metacritic barely even includes any reviews from the East (besides just a few Famitsu reviews here and there), but almost all of its reviews are from the West (that would be like using only Eastern reviews to say the East dominates the West). Even among its Western sources, most of those sources are in the English language, with very few in other European languages. Also, Metacritic is useless for games before 2000, since it only covers modern sites and publications still around today, ignoring most of the popular publications from the 80's and 90's (which were dominated by Japanese games), not to mention its database only starts from the PS1. Metacritic's selection of sources is clearly biased towards the West.

Games made in Europe and the US don't really look and play distinctly different, though. Asking people which they prefer wouldn't make much sense to me for that reason. There is a far clearer difference between most games that come from Japan and those from the west. Thus, it makes more sense to compare these games and ask people which they prefer, imo.

@SolidGame_basic: it's not really fair with this topic. The east is essentially only Japan, so we are comparing one country to western Europe and USA + Canada. To answer the question right now the west is up but mgsv, bloodbourne, FF15 eta are looking good.

Both are good, but prefer East. :P

It's hard to say really, but from my experience, I can say with a great deal of confidence that the east are leagues ahead of the west in terms of in depth gameplay mechanics. All you have to do is look at fighters and hack in slash games. These two genres require a great deal of depth and precision in terms of gameplay mechanics and the east is miles ahead of the west in both. I'd say this is pretty much irrefutable, but I'm open to a rebuttal.

Well technically the last two God tier Donkey Kong games are western developed as Retro is based in Texas. That's always the wrench that gets thrown in my response to this topic. I generally favor eastern developers over western developers, but my all time favourite developer is from the Americas...

In fact, the two best games I played last gen (Donkey Kong Country Returns and Batman Arkham Asylum) are western developed.

West side is the best side

That is a very good point. Donkey Kong is a western game now.

40 games on my shelf are from the west.

8 games on my shelf from the east.

I prefer western games. Sorry, but unless you are obsessed with Japanese culture/anime/nintendo/jrpg's/quirky weird games/dating sims etc, the Japanese games suck.

You can even see it in this thread. All the anime/nintendo fans love Japanese games while everyone else prefers west. I like both.....but WEST EASILY HAS MORE SUPERIOR GAMES! FACT!

Yeah, there's not much difference between Europe and North America these days. In contrast, there is a huge difference between Eastern nations like Japan, Korea, China, and Russia, each of which have clearly distinct gaming cultures. Korean games, for example, are almost like a world apart from Japanese games, even though they're just across the sea from each other.

Western gaming wasn't always so homogeneous though. Europe had its own distinct gaming culture(s) back in the days, somewhere in between, but different from, both Japan and America. But in the post-GTA era, it's pretty hard to tell the difference between European and North American games. Most people wouldn't think that a franchise as "American" as GTA is developed in Scotland, after all.

@stuff238: I own more western games, too. That is because way more games are made in the west. The question is which are better, though. I would say east.

I think it really is dependent on what kind of gaming styles you prefer. The popular western games are more of a cinematic experience and action oriented; tons of first person shooters to choose from. Eastern style games typically are games are typically RPGs or games that deliver more of a pure gaming experience.

I think the West wins, but that is only as of last generation.

Japan has been the de facto creative giant of the interactive world from 1980 to 2010. But since last generation we are seeing more development houses in the East struggle with new more powerful hardware with few notable exceptions. The West is where gaming is blossoming now. Keep in mind the definition for the "West" encompasses Canada, U.S. and all over Europe. Some singular new devs coming out of Eastern Europe. While the East pretty much just means Japan with some developers in South Korea and China.