Inafune: Japanese industry "is finished"

Capcom R&D chief Keiji Inafune told journalists at a Dead Rising 2 event on Friday that his reaction to the Tokyo Game Show was despair at the state of the Japanese games industry.

"When I looked around all the different games at the TGS event floor, I said, 'Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished,'" Inafune said, in comments translated by Capcom's Ben Judd and captured by Destructoid.

"But, just so you all don't think that the game industry is finished, Capcom is doing our best. I wanted to [have] this party and show you there are still some kickass games out there coming from Japan."

Inafune is well known for his belief that Japanese developers need to think globally in order to match the success of their Western competitors, and he delivered a speech to that effect at Capcom's annual press event in Monaco earlier in the year.

He practices what he preaches, too, working with Canadian developer Blue Castle on the production of Dead Rising 2, and putting a lot of weight behind Dark Void, developed by Airtight Studios in the US. Even Capcom's Japanese-developed titles like Lost Planet 2, produced by Jun Takeuchi, now have a touch of the West about them on Inafune's watch.