[Jotaku]

According to The Book of Esports: The Definitive Guide to Competitive Video Games book, it is mentioned that "THE BIG FIVE" (basically most popular video game genres in esports field today) are: first-person shooters (FPS), battle royales, MOBAs, collectible card games, and fighters. But here we don't see RTS genre. But about 20 years ago, RTS was the most popular esports genre along with FPS if you ever heard of the famous name such as StarCraft, WarCraft, and Age of Empires. It seems like that due to the emergence of MOBA genre, originated from StarCraft's Aeon of Strife (AoS) and Dota map from WarCraft 3, RTS was replaced with MOBA in that "THE BIG FIVE" list.

Today we will talk about the failure of RTS and FPS genres as competitive genres in Japan, the land of anime and samurai.

While there are so many globally successful anime-style fighting games in Japan such as Guilty Gear Strive & Dragon Ball FighterZ, due to this reason now I am thinking why genres like FPS and RTS couldn't be successful in Japan, so that we couldn't see any of anime RTS game until we see the 2024 release of new Japanese RTS game "The Touhou Empires" since the advent of the initial Japanese RTS games such as "Star Maidens Chronicles (命短したたかえ！乙女〜トマト大戦 紅の陣〜)" by ProjectYNP and "Hundred Swords" by SEGA 10~20 years ago, but the gap between them and Touhou Empires is like 20 years. No major video game developers in Japan such as Bandai Namco, Square Enix, etc, tried developing them over the decades.

Fighting, RTS and FPS, they all have a history of the success in global stages, but only FPS and RTS couldn't be successful in Japan.

But my shallow guess upon this subject matter is perhaps that these FPS and RTS genres are hard to make a fanservice, one of the most effective marketing strategies for any anime games. Injecting anime art into the video game and the buyers' tendencies on such games would implicate that its gamer are more interested in watching their beautiful, kawaii anime characters than game mechanic like how actually fun the game is as a video game.

I know one video game developer named "Takaki kenichiro (高木 謙一郎)" who once succeeded in creating popular video game series by offering an array of fanservices into the game, called "Senran Kagura". Such an activity resulted in the natural creations of many online communities as a byproduct, like Senran International at twitter community (If you see their twitter messages they still provides variosu fanservices even if the game is no longer active since the Sony banned the game from their PlayStation store due to the censorship issue). You can also check how fanservice is proposed throughout the Senran Kagura Series.



To prove it, the recent release of "Elphet Valentine" in Guilty Gear Strive drove its players to buy her on impulse. Moreover, if you look at attached chart image above about "most played Guilty Gear Strive character", you can see directly that the most successful one is an anime girl named "Bridget" in the game (this poll is conducted before the release of "Elphet Valentine"). Does Guilty Gear Strive employs any fanservice? Yes, Guilty Gear Strive do a kind of partial fanservice indirectly but not explictly at Senran Kagura level.

So, we seem to have reached the fundamental and core problem at game design level. As a fighting game being side-scrolling, it's way easier to draw anime characters in details, that allows developers to put a kinds of fanservices into their games. The point is "being able to render anime character in detail right in front of the player so that it can influence gamers provocatively". This attempt is generally possible to implement in almost all genres. But unfortunately, THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE IN FPS AND RTS. (TPS is possible so we see many TPS anime games like Super Mecha Champions, Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash, Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet, etc). And I presume that such a difficulty in the process of designing a video game is one of the major reasons why RTS and FPS couldn't evolve in Japan that well. The only closest one I witnessted a potential way of injecting fanservice in RTS genre is as the following picture from The Touhou Empires.



But it still definitely lacks to be said enough, and very hard to say it as a part of a fanservice, as it is simply an animation of casting a skill.

My 2nd additional guess upon why there isn't popular FPS and RTS games in Japan is because those genres are actually invented and developed by western countries, not Japan-originiated. So that no Japanese has even seriously attempted to find a solution to this problem.

I mean is there any possible way to inject fanservices in RTS genre, or any ways to render character in details during the game, in which case and how? We need briliant ideas upon here for any anime game developer trying to make high-quality anime FPS or RTS games. Fanservice is the one of the most effective marketing strategies that any anime game developer utilizes, even a very top-selling anime game like Guilty Gear Strive does.

Conversely, if you disagree with the lack of fanservice in RTS and FPS genres is a core issue why they haven't succeeeded in Japan, please also share your thoughts.

[Jotaku]

1 Possible solution to add a Fanservice into RTS genre for anime fans would be:


Anime RTS game dev may put fanservice animation right there. But I don't recommend doing that on first 1~5 clicks.

If you ever played StarCraft before, they start to make something unique expressions after you press same unit more than 4~5 times.

In that way I think an anime game dev can successfully integrate fanservice into the game for anime gamers, even if RTS is hard to provide such thing.

Here is the example animation from StarCraft:

Here is the test