Abstract
Since the end of the 1980s, numerous Japanese game companies have attempted to enter the Chinese market, now the world’s largest for online and smartphone games. While these companies had successfully outsourced production to China early on, entering China’s consumer sector has proven more difficult. Based on semi-structured interviews with managers at Japanese companies that have consumer divisions in China, this chapter describes their struggles entering the Chinese market. Particular attention is paid to three general phases of how Japanese companies considered China as an opportunity target—China as a site for outsourcing, China as an emerging market, and China as a mature market—and these phases are explored through representative case studies, namely Sony Interactive Entertainment, Koei Tecmo, and Square Enix.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter refers to the People’s Republic of China as “China,” excluding the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao and other Chinese-speaking regions such as Taiwan. Occasionally, “the PRC” and “mainland China” are used.
- 2.
The second chapter of Nakamura (2018) is dedicated to the emergence of clone servers and some of the early attempts by Japanese platform holders to go through international trade companies.
- 3.
As mentioned, the company merged with Tecmo in 2009 and is currently known as Koei Tecmo. For the present case, the former name is used until the deployment of a new set of strategies began to emerge after the 2009 merger.
- 4.
Hideki Tojo was Prime Minister of the Empire of Japan during World War II and was later convicted of numerous war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
- 5.
This is based on the copyright name on the official home page of Uncharted Waters Online as archived by archive.org on July 18, 2007 (web.archive.org/web/20070718062655/http://www.dolchn.com).
- 6.
This is based on the copyright name on the official home page of Uncharted Waters Online as archived by archive.org on Aug. 27, 2009 (web.archive.org/web/20090827112641/http://www.zrplay.com).
- 7.
This is based on the announcement on the official site as archived by archive.org on Feb. 22, 2011 (web.archive.org/web/20110222011929/http://www.zrplay.com).
- 8.
The official site indicated only the copyright of Square Enix China, as archived by archive.org on Jan. 11, 2006 (web.archive.org/web/20060111090602/http://www.shushijie.com.cn).
- 9.
Blizzard licensed its MMORPG World of Warcraft to the Chinese domestic company The9, Ltd., in 2005.
- 10.
The interview was conducted on July 31, 2014, and published in manuscript form in 2015 (Nakamura 2015, p. 394).
- 11.
The ways in which local employees in the PRC increased their organizational capabilities in develo** digital games and related components require further investigation.
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Nakamura, A. (2024). Japanese Game Company Strategies for Entering China: Comparative Case Studies from 1989 to 2019. In: Chen, F., McAllister, K.S., Ruggill, J.E. (eds) The Chinese Video Game Industry. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41504-3_7
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