Yoshida: Japanese gamers now open to Western releases

Sony's president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, believes that Japanese gamers are now more open to Western games.

Speaking to the European PlayStation Blog, Yoshida revealed that Everybody's Golf and Uncharted: Golden Abyss were the most pre-ordered games ahead of the Vita's Japanese launch last week.

According to Yoshida, the prominence of the US-developed Uncharted in a line-up dominated by Japanese games is indicative of a larger trend in the region.

"Japanese people traditionally have a strong local preference, particularly with the Manga style look of characters that they love," he said. "But as technology and presentation advances in games like Uncharted and Call of Duty, they are rightly seeing their quality."

The Japanese launch of the PlayStation Vita was accompanied by 24 games at a range of different price-points. Yoshida claims that this variety in software is a key focus for the Vita, and Sony developed the hardware with ease of development in mind.

"When I saw new developers coming in and getting straight to work on those systems when they had matured, I could not believe how quickly they were getting their games up and running. I have never seen anything like it before."

This also extends to dev teams of different sizes. Yoshida admitted that his personal favourite Vita game is Sound Shapes, an experimental music game almost entirely created by Everyday Shooter developer Jonathan Mak.

"I'm a fan of these small developers," Yoshida added. "The best thing is that they have experience in every part of planning, developing and releasing. It's not like they have left school and gone to work in a team of 100, only ever working on one particular aspect of their game."

"They don't follow the traditional game conventions; some of them are very vocal about trying to break those rules. They are the next generation and they will be changing the landscape of gaming long after I have retired."