Former PlayStation indie boss Shuhei Yoshida has revealed during an interview with AVWatch that the arrival of Nier Automata ‘revived’ the Japanese games industry.
Yoshida-san revealed that the Japanese games industry were attempting to chase after western trends during the PlayStation 3 console era, and therefore found itself struggling afterwards. However, Nier: Automata was conceived by creator Yoko Taro without concerns on whether it would appeal to audiences overseas or not.
Related Content – Upcoming PS5 Games 2025: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon
From there, it became clear that Japanese creators were making ‘Japanese things’ and those things were selling overseas. Everyone realized that with NieR. It was just a matter of saying ‘it’s okay to do it like that,’ but ‘we have to do it like that. So the direction of Japanese creators became ‘let’s stop imitating overseas countries anymore,’ ‘if we create things with our own culture and that we understand, they will understand it overseas.’
I think the Japanese game industry was revived after NieR so much so that I would say it was before NieR and after NieR. To put it simply, I think NieR: Automata was the title that made people realize ‘let’s make something Japanese.’
Speaking in the same interview, Yoshida-san revealed that the closure of SIE Japan Studio was partly down to the fact PlayStation bosses did not want to invest more in AA games.