"Goddess of Victory: NIKKE" in Tokyo Tower.

Let's get started!

This event is a fan meeting for a certain game.

It's proved very popular among young players.

The characters are totally cute, so I've really gotten hooked on it.

I got pulled into the world of the game, and now I can't quit playing.

It was released by China's largest game publisher.

Our business is making what the players want.

That's what lets them get drawn into our games.

The game industry continues to expand.

In 2022, it had annual sales of 203 billion US dollars.

3 billion people are gamers, more than a third of the world's population.

Japan has long been known as a major force in the video game industry.

Now, to survive on a global scale, a drastic change is occurring there.

I don't know what I did, but it was cool!

It felt great when I pulled off a special move.

This video game company that created generation-defining fighting games

is making a huge change to a well-loved series.

To increase interest among users worldwide,

it has revamped the character designs and game system.

Our concept was a Street Fighter that could be enjoyed by all mankind.

That's right, all mankind.

ELDEN RING!

Meanwhile, another Japanese game maker has given birth to worldwide hits by pursuing their own trajectory.

Their games are known to be agonizingly difficult,

a twist mesmerizing loyal users to attain unprecedented success.

Even as a niche, being a global niche is totally different.

Having this many players out there allows games to be developed to suit specific needs.

A battle for the ages spans the globe as game makers worldwide plan their next attack.

In this program, we follow the challengers in this massive industry.

One of the largest video game events in the world, the Tokyo Game Show.

A new peak of 787 companies exhibited their latest creations.

240 thousand attendees witnessed the spectacle.

We have space for just 10 more!

One booth attracted particular interest from fans.

Wow! Wow!

It was for fighting game Street Fighter 6.

After 7 years, the latest entry to the series.

Shoryuken!

I love the excitement in their voices.

Perfect.

Development has been led by the game's director, Nakayama Takayuki, and its producer, Matsumoto Shuhei.

They're eager to gauge player response.

I was happy to see so many people lining up.

It's nice to see people playing.

Of course, people had played the series a lot in arcades.

But these days there are fewer arcades, so it's great to see them out here.

You feel a connection.

The game was created by one of Japan's most prominent video game developers and publishers, Capcom.

Over the last decade, they've seen a steady increase in sales.

Their sales in the 2022 fiscal year amounted to around 900 million dollars.

80% of that came from the overseas market.

Their long creative history has boasted numerous hits in diverse genres including horror and action.

Among them, Street Fighter is one of the most famous.

The series began in 1987, and Street Fighter II dominated the arcade scene in the early 90s.

The fighting game featured a cast of colorful characters hailing from around the globe.

Street Fighter II Dash. The individual competition begins!

Special moves are pulled off with masterful command of the joystick and buttons.

Tournaments filled with arcade warriors waiting to show their skills swept the country, creating a social phenomenon.

For over 3 decades since then, the series has commanded continuing popularity.

We were given permission to visit the development area.

Are you playing?

Of course not.

We're performing research.

The current development team has been working together for about 5 years.

In order to expand overseas sales, they sought to change things up.

From programmers to designers and composers,

more than 300 staff members have worked on the latest iteration.

Their goal was 10 times the success of a million seller: 10 million copies in sales.

We considered how to reach out to countries with people who had never played before.

How to get people to think that it looks fun and give it a try is the challenge I face.

The first step they took was refreshing the design.

In previous games, characters were depicted with an anime-like style favored in Japan.

But internationally, gamers tend to prefer character models with more realistic features.

I think that anime style is a hit with people who like anime, or that sort of image.

But something intended to appeal to a wide variety of people should be

a style that they're all familiar with.

That's why we decided to go with a base of more realistic textures.

One focal point was the depiction of muscles.

Being a fighting game, the characters tend to be very physically fit.

To convey this, we actually assembled a team for muscle research.

The developers enlisted the help of bodybuilders and martial artists from around the world.

First, they photographed their physiques from every conceivable angle.

They used this data to bring a new level of reality to the characters.

She's one of the top bodybuilders.

You can see that she has very little fat, and her muscles are strongly defined.

This is a martial arts champion.

Although she isn't as heavily built,

she seems to be muscled in a way that withstands damage.

They record not just overall appearances,

but the slight movements among muscles.

Ryu is a Japanese martial artist, so he isn't quite bulging with muscles.

This is a game after all,

so we went for a degree of emphasis where he could still look Japanese.

Zangief is a huge wrestler, so he's got plenty of both muscle and fat.

Even his bone structure is big, and we aimed to put that across.

Power! Look at this body of iron!

Another vital strategy to the game is making sure

that people all over the world can enjoy it to the same extent.

My job involves localizing all of Capcom's games into various different languages with the localization team.

Street Fighter 6 is being translated into 14 languages, which in addition to English,

include languages such as Polish and Arabic.

When designing the stages set in each country,

special attention was paid to making them authentic.

Take the streets of France.

This crepe shop was planned to be selling churros.

But when we asked the French staff, they told us that nobody eats churros there.

Naturally crepes are popular in France, so we thought that would make sense.

We designed the storefront accordingly.

For the game's theme, they went with hip-hop for its worldwide appeal.

Hip-hop is a genre of music that's appreciated all over the world.

Our concept was a Street Fighter that can be enjoyed by all mankind.

We wanted to give it as broad an appeal as possible.

Until now, I think not having that is something that limited us.

I'd like to break boundaries, in a positive sense.

On a worldwide scale, there are many regions where the infrastructure is still developing.

That's one reason why more people may start gaming in the future.

It'll be essential to understand how they play games, or hear about them.

As Japanese video game creators pursue an increasingly global standard,

the game industry's growth continues to accelerate.

6 trillion yen or about 56 billion dollars in sales in 2014 have multiplied to 200 billion dollars in 2021.

Although during that time, the Japanese domestic market doubled from around 9 billion dollars to 18 billion,

the pace of growth in regions like North America and China has been far greater.

With advances in technology, graphics have made leaps in fidelity.

Bringing a high-quality game to market now requires years of work with many people involved.

The funding needed for development also reaches staggering sums.

Professor Koyama Yusuke has devoted extensive research to video game manufacturing.

He points out that it's not unheard of for games to require 100 million dollars in production costs.

It used to be that developers could focus just on the domestic market.

Now, that wouldn't even cover costs.

Japan is still important, but the economy won't likely regain its former strength.

There's a limit to our economic power, so how to sell games overseas becomes a key issue.

Two months have passed since the release of Street Fighter 6.

It really stands out!

The producers stop by a music festival.

Capcom has set up a booth at a non-game-related event to judge the reaction from outside their core audience.

In this entry to the series, a fundamental change was made to the game's formula.

All right!

I don't know what I did, but it was cool!

I thought that it was a lot harder to do attacks with the button presses or something.

It felt great when I pulled off a special move.

A system to easily use special moves has been implemented into the game.

We want to open it up to everyone.

Everyone should be able to enjoy letting loose with a fireball.

Let us begin.

Don't expect me to be a pushover.

The game contains between 20 and 30 moves for each character.

The shoryuken, for example.

Normally, it would be performed by rolling the directional key right, down,

and diagonally to the lower right, ending with a press of an attack button.

In the "modern" control scheme, all this can be done with one button press.

This was added to significantly lower the barrier to entry, attracting new players.

However, the change incited a wave of criticism from long-time players.

Some people regard the necessity of inputting challenging attacks as a test of skill.

There was some resistance to it from longtime players.

Nakayama deeply understood the criticisms leveled at the change by fans.

He himself has been a fan of the series since childhood.

We had house rules that none among our friends could use the same character.

Guile and Dhalsim were the ones left.

I thought about which one to pick, and decided Guile looked cooler.

Nakayama first became involved with the development of Street Fighter in 2014.

He worked alongside Matsumoto, another longtime fan of the series.

The first obstacle they encountered was the difficulty of attracting new players.

What struck me most was that if you ask, "Who knows Street Fighter," everyone does.

Then you ask them, "Who plays the game regularly?"

It's just a few people, or none.

I thought this was a really risky situation to be in.

I don't want to see the popularity of Street Fighter trail off.

I thought about what we could do to surpass the previous games.

That meant adding in features that could be enjoyed by all current players.

We set about doing everything we could in that direction.

The battle to stand at the pinnacle of the video game industry is one that spans the globe.

Currently, Chinese game developers are the fastest growing in the world.

In 2022, the Chinese game industry boasted sales of 39 billion dollars,

nearly equal to the U.S. game industry.

The most popular game in China is a multiplayer online battle arena,

or "MOBA" game, Honor of Kings.

Active users number more than 100 million.

In 2022, a tournament was held offering more than 7 million dollars in prize money.

The game is developed and published by Tencent.

We received permission to film at their office.

Yearly sales at Tencent's game department are about 25 billion dollars,

more than that of the entire Japanese video game industry.

The company's employees number around 100,000.

Their headquarters includes gyms and restaurants,

practically a whole town devoted to their staff.

Tencent has been buying up game developers all over Europe, North America and Asia.

They now hold 20 development studios around the world.

And their next goal?

This shooter game was developed with an eye toward sales in North America.

Players team up to take on opponents.

This is a strategy game made with regions such as Mexico in mind.

Players hatch plans based on the changing tide of battle.

By working with global studios,

Tencent seeks to develop games that address the needs of players in each region.

We place a great importance on the cultures of each region,

so that we can deliver enjoyment to players there.

We hope that by providing a positive experience, they'll recognize the high quality of our games.

Japan is one of their main targets.

This is a shooter they released in 2022, Goddess of Victory: NIKKE.

The characters are artificial humanoids known as Nikkes.

The anime-style visuals were designed to appeal to Japanese players.

The game is about more than visuals.

It features an RPG system where characters grow and deepen their bonds with the player.

The characters eventually reveal surprising backstories.

And a long time ago, I had a little brother.

Yeah, he's gone.

I want to talk about him after such a long time.

I wonder if my little brother will be as outstanding as you.

The game grasps the Japanese trend of becoming emotionally invested in characters through their growth.

We met with the team focused on development of the game.

They told us about their marketing and analysis performed for the Japanese release.

What part of the game do you work on?

I work on promotional videos and visuals that encourage communication with the players.

Their research extends not just into Japanese games, but also manga and music,

in order to grasp the cultural landscape.

In the summer of 2023, they chose the event called Comic Market as a means to promote the game.

Cosplayers dressed as characters from the game appeared there,

and the photo session was crowded with fans.

In just a year of service, the game has reached 25 million downloads,

propelling it to sales of nearly 400 million dollars.

The characters, like this one, have a mysterious element to them that's very appealing.

As cute as they are, some have tragic pasts.

Learning about them makes you like the characters even more.

We have built up a certain degree of understanding toward users worldwide.

Based on that, we choose the direction and work with our colleagues in R&D to create our games.

Increasing globalization of the game industry has led to changes in the play environment as well.

This service, Steam, provides a means to download games produced all over the world.

All of them are for play on computers.

160,000 games are available through the service,

which is used by an estimated 100 million people.

The number of games made to play on PCs or smartphones is skyrocketing.

Home game consoles command only 19% of the market.

The fact that people can play games without dedicated consoles is a big issue.

In advanced developing countries, smartphones and PCs are the only options.

Japan had once stood at the top of the industry through its mastery of home consoles.

As they became less influential, Japan lost its edge in attracting new users.

The efforts of Japanese game companies are now pitted against worldwide competition.

Games made in developing countries find a direct audience with advanced countries.

Countries that weren't influential before might produce a hit game.

As the culture of games expands globally,

the industry has opened up to the possibility of hits from anywhere in the world.

Amidst this intense international competition,

one game publisher has delivered breakout hits.

Alright. The Game of the Year, winner is... ELDEN RING!

What a surprise. Thank you.

In 2022, Elden Ring was awarded Game of the Year.

While journeying through a vast open-world environment,

players do battle with all manner of frightful foes.

The game was developed by Japanese company FromSoftware.

Shrouded in secrecy, neither their development studio nor staff was available for filming.

What gives FromSoftware their overwhelming international appeal?

We asked an American journalist who has covered their releases for his opinion.

This genre of Souls-like, which is kind of defined by very difficult combat,

a freedom of customization in being able to approach different challenges with different builds,

and having a very large risk-reward element to the gameplay.

FromSoftware is known for their highly challenging games.

Not long after starting...

A huge beast swoops out of the sky, crushing the player instantly.

On the next try, they manage to avoid its talons...

But are instead burnt alive.

By enduring game over after game over, step by step,

players discover the way to defeat enemies.

It's common to spend hours of play time battling a single boss.

It's a very specific style of difficulty.

It's not based so much on split-second reflex testing.

It really is based on learning as you go, taking notes every time you die,

and coming back stronger with more knowledge to overcome a certain challenge.

Following the game's release, internet communities sprung up devoted to the details of gameplay.

Players from across the globe competitively post videos of their feats,

and come up with strategies together,

sharing knowledge to work their way through the game.

I saw it's coming. Thank god...

Despite, or thanks to its intense difficulty, Elden Ring has sold 20 million copies in the past year.

A specialist in the game industry explains that there's a distinct secret behind this success.

They aim for very niche markets.

Even as a niche, being a global niche is totally different.

Having this many players out there allows games to be developed to suit specific needs.

The market size increases on the level of millions of games sold, sometimes 10 million.

It all comes down to how best to handle a globally popular property.

We can definitively say that how to realize the appeal to fans is a critical point.

Meanwhile, Street Fighter 6 is making its mark on the global arena.

With 2 million copies sold in the first month since its release, it's off to a good start.

As the next step, the producers are working on downloadable content for the game.

We're playing the next downloadable character, A.K.I.

So, shall we put him out of his misery?

This new addition to the roster is a poisonous, serpentine femme fatale.

Time for some experimentation...

I bet poison would work wonders on you.

Including the ideas and designs, it takes nearly two years to make a character.

They took care to make her movements look totally distinct.

Motion capture was used in the process.

In motion capture, dozens of markers are applied all over the body and filmed with 150 special cameras.

Actual human movements are digitally captured.

She sways a little, so I'd like you to drop down as low as you can.

A.K.I. contrasts the fluid motions of a snake with sudden, sharp strikes.

Two actors take part in the filming.

One of them is a contortionist.

The other, a stunt performer.

She's got sharp movements, and she points her nails toward the opponent.

We found someone who is very flexible.

That let us give the character odd, limber movements that people usually can't do.

If we can mix them with sharp movements, it should give her depth as a character.

Here we go. Start!

They aim to incorporate the special skills of both performers.

For the clawed attacking motions, they use the version performed by the stuntperson.

The wide leg sweeps and other flexible moves feature the contortionist.

And for the sharp poses, they again use the stuntperson.

Through their combined efforts,

a range of motions impossible for any single person are captured.

We got it.

Thank you very much.

To keep players invested in the game, updates are essential.

If interest trails off, the huge investment in the game could be all in vain.

We keep on adding things and making adjustments.

I don't feel like we're anywhere near done.

I thought we might have some downtime after release, but we're always busy.

We might not get time off for the next decade.

There was one more addition to make the game as accessible as possible.

In line with their concept to let anyone enjoy the game,

they added the option of sound effects indicating character distance.

This acts as an audio guide for players with sight impairments.

We need to make the game easily playable to as wide a range of people as we can.

In August 2023, a large fighting game event was held in Las Vegas.

Street Fighter 6!!!...

7,000 people from over 50 countries and regions participated in the Street Fighter competition.

The response from fans far exceeded Nakayama's expectations.

I got the chance to see so many people playing and practicing there.

At last, I could truly feel that the game had been released.

The tournament was also streamed online,

where 3.7 million fans watched from around the world.

The players included people with visual impairments.

He used his gauge! Will it be enough?

Not quite, but...

He's burned out!

It ended with a headbutt!

Great match.

He really did it just by sound!

The championship featured a player from the Dominican Republic

against one from the United Arab Emirates.

Tense strikes were exchanged...

Special moves landed...

And finally...

Angry Bird, you are the Street Fighter 6 Evolution 2023 champion!...

I was just ecstatic.

Something from Japan has become a test of strength for people on a global scale.

It's simple, isn't it?

Matches letting players compete fairly with people of other countries

and languages is a great thing.

Games have shown the power to bring the world together.

This limitless possibility is an aspect of their work that Nakayama and his colleagues savor.

The industry continues its ceaseless expansion.

In October 2023, Microsoft bought out a major American game company for over 68 billion dollars.

From the deal, an industry giant grew even larger.

With its record of over 500 million units of home console sales,

Sony is preparing their counterstrike.

They've released a device letting players access games anywhere there's Wi-Fi,

without the need for a TV.

They seek to create an environment of even greater accessibility to their consoles.

We hope to give people more places to play.

Since we've built the Playstation as a platform, that's very important to us.

In China, Tencent has announced 10 new titles currently in development.

By accurately measuring user needs in diverse locations,

they aim to expand their market even further.

We'll continue making new games with skilled developers worldwide.

I think that we'll bring many new titles to the market.

There it is!

Nice to see parents playing with their children.

As their goal for the future, Capcom works to sell 100 million games a year.

The endless battle rages on...

The Asian market is big, and there are lots of areas to develop in Africa and Europe.

So many people come together to make our games,

so I'd like to see them played by people everywhere.

We're just getting started.

The harder we work, the better the result.

We've got a lot left to do.

Do we ever.