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I have a appreciation for how far Pokemon has come, since it's beginning with red and blue. I'll give you guys an example of what I mean with Johto's Violet city. Compare the city with HG/SS's and G/S/C's lay out. You'll see that HG/SS's Violet city is much more detailed (giving it a bit more individuality other than G/S/C coloring the town violet) and compact, while G/S/C's Violet city is huge and a bit same-looking with sharing it's building design with the other cities. It's really neat imo. http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Violet_City (Unable to provide an image link. Sorry.)

Its not news that Japanese gaming companies like Sega, Capcom, Konami, and Square Enix are not doing so hot. This decline has been going for a couple of years now but its recently come to a head mostly with news of Sega's financial woes and Konami's questionable if not outright criminal business practices. This is due to a number of reasons but they usually center around producing poor products one after the other (ala Sonic Boom), firing their creative minds (Konami), bad DLC practices which dissuade the market (Capcom), and a general shift from producing AAA titles to ports on mobile platforms and Pachinko Machines (Konami and Square Enix). If the recent news is proof of anything this shift in business practice has been detrimental to their companies. For starters Capcom has been on the verge of bankruptcy for the past couple of years and its speculated that they will be bought out eventually despite their strong anti-takeover policy. http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/06/capcom_could_be_up_for_sale_after_shareholders_reject_anti_takeover_plan While Sega's CEO has gone on record at admitting their poor products and "betraying" their fanbase their profits are down by 40-50% which is pretty bad for any business regardless and bar Atlus they have no future releases outside of Japan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsGlmNM8OhA Konami has had nothing but bad press as of late with the controversial firing of Kojima and the harsh business practices and shift to Pachinko and mobile games. Needless to say it doesn't seem to be helping given that they voluntarily delisted themselves from the NYC stock exchange as a "cost saving measure" http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/27/8503893/konami-delists-itself-from-new-york-stock-exchange My question is as many good IPs and products these companies produced in the past, what the hell happened? Its as if they abandoned a working strategy and catalog of good products in favor of jumping on the mobile bandwagon and have made one terrible decision after the last. I get that the mobile market is huge in Japan but so far it doesn't seem to be paying off at all for these companies and if anything it has had the opposite effect and is driving them to bankruptcy and irrelevance. Sure you could port a game like Final Fantasy over to mobile but what average mom or joe is going to care about it let alone pay $15 for it? I'm not the only one seeing this am I? Anyone else have thoughts or information regarding the Japanese market? Is there something I'm missing or uniformed on?

So I read an article on ign recently that got me thinking about the concept of gaming hype. Or the buildup of games prior to release. Sure its always been around just look at old ads for NES and Genesis games. But with the growth of the industry as a whole and the explosion of the Internet we now get to see parts of games more frequently and some such as Smash get built up pretty high. Why not do this? It is essentially pregaming and advertising for the developers and the companies involved. It builds on the emotion surrounding the game and in theory should make more people want to buy it. Well there are some out there that would debate that hype is actually a bad thing and that all it does is build people up only to get jaded and disappointed and in their eyes the game(s) just become a taint in the series they once loved. So where do I stand? Well not going to lie I've bought into hype numerous times (how can you not at times?) and left games feeling slightly disappointed or that they were not as good as I thought they would be. But this is mostly my fault due to a lack of experience and probably reading up more on the game than I should have. That being said its not to say these games were not good games they still were. But I do notice that the less I know about a game I tend to enjoy it more because theres more suprise and discovery involved (this was my case with Awakening) and you get that sense of something new. Hype isn't a bad thing per se especially for the producers but from a personal perspective I've just learned to be cautiously optimistic and take things as they come with a grain salt. EDIT: Link to the aforementioned IGN article if you're interested. http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/01/31/opinion-hype-isnt-always-a-bad-thing-hype-is-hope