Given how many of us grew up playing classic Japanese games, it’s no surprise that people are keen to work on games in Japan.
But what’s the reality on the ground? What skills do you need to succeed in the Japanese game industry, and what challenges can you expect to encounter?
To find out, I interviewed a number of current and former members of the game industry here in Japan, for their thoughts on:
- What makes Japanese game development different?
- The upside of working on games in Japan
- The downside
- How they got started in the Japanese game industry
- Their top tips for success
- Conclusion
Our interviewees hail from five different countries, work in roles ranging from studio head to entry-level programmer, and have developed everything from Nintendo games to 18+ eroge.
- Marc Trudel is the Studio Head at Wizcorp, a studio specializing in visual effects, porting games, and developing custom tools and engines for the Japanese game industry. He’s Canadian and has lived in Japan since 2009.
- Mathieu Siboulotte is a French developer hired as a game designer at the international creative company Studio No Border in 2020.
- Tristan Metz came from the Netherlands in 2024 to work as a game programmer at AVR Japan, an XR solution company.
- Minh Nguyen is a Vietnamese developer who worked for DMM Games, which specializes in erotic games (eroge), from 2017–2020 before switching industries.
- Jared Hays is an American who was employed by the Nintendo-affiliated company Good Feel between 2011 and 2017. He now works for a gaming company in the US.
What makes Japanese game development different?
Tristan Metz pointed out the most obvious difference: “In the Netherlands we tend to stick to only English, whereas in Japan both Japanese and English often tend to be required.”
I also feel that in Japan there is much more of a hierarchy and emphasis on your position within the company. . . . I do think that even the Japanese language itself inherently makes interacting with people feel more formal.
“This might also have to do with the fact that the Netherlands tends to have a very flat hierarchy for many organizations,” Metz concluded.
Minh Nguyen doesn’t see as much difference in company structure. “I think in terms of team composition it won’t differ that much compared to other countries. We would have a product owner (the term is “director”) who makes initiatives for overall game direction; planners, who design game specs, feature, and gameplay-balancing; designers, who create art and models for the characters and environments and UIs in-game; and developers, who implement back-end or front-end. Testers are usually from outsourcing companies who do testing and verify behavior, and planners would also have to test new releases themselves.”
According to Nguyen, the development process is about the same as well. “We would also use Scrum/Kanban to iterate development cycles, as seen in other software companies,” he said.
What he has noticed is that Japan focuses on a different category of games.
Games in Japan are mostly RPG-flavored [social] games that have characters and a lottery system called gacha to make money. If you are more into MOBA/FPS/strategy then unfortunately those are nonexistent here.
For Marc Trudel, the real appeal of developing in Japan is the intense passion of those in the industry. “I had one client that’s head of R&D,” Trudel told me, “and we’re having dinner together, and we’re talking about what games do we play when we have time off, and he says, ‘I don’t play games.’ I was like, ‘Okay, so what do you do?’ ‘Well, I read about neurology in infants and children, to try to understand how the brain works in the context of gaming.’”
“He’s not leading game projects,” Trudel added, “and yet he clearly has an interest in how those game projects can have a beneficial impact on younger people. . . . It impresses me.”
That dedication, and that passion [Japanese developers] have . . . I don’t want to say it’s not found overseas, but here it seems to me like it’s so consistent. Everyone I talk to is going to have a story of their own, a focus of their own.
But Jared Hays thinks that trademark passion can easily manifest as stubborn single-mindedness. “There’s a certain amount of, ‘If it’s not working, just try harder.’
“One of the biggest differences, and certainly the biggest in work culture, was that in Japan there was very little interest in improving processes. So it was, ‘Well, we made the last game this way and it’s shipped, and it sold, and we made money, so we’re just gonna make the next game the same way.’”
And there was really no room to say, ‘Have you tried doing X?’ Or, ‘Yes, we made the game, but we did this thing that drove people crazy, people quit, everyone got burned out.’ It was not a good way to make the game. [They] just said, ‘Yes, but it worked.’
Hays offered an example: “Yoshi’s Woolly World was really built on top of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, on top of the tech stack that they had built, which was in turn built on top of a WarioWare game they had made. So those first two were for the Wii, and then Woolly World was for the Wii U. And as they moved onto the next game, the scale of the game and the things they tried to do got bigger, because players expected more. . . . So, Woolly World had no project management, no production, zero. There was no issue tracking. There was no schedule planning, nothing.”
I went to school for both computer science and game development, and one of the courses that I found incredibly valuable was a course, not in the nuts and bolts of programming, but in software engineering that really taught working in a team and coordinating with people, communication, delivering milestones, all of the things that most modern devs consider the other 80 percent of the job. And they just had none of that.
“If we could align our schedules so that people aren’t sitting around waiting for other people half the week, maybe people wouldn’t need to work overtime,” Hays said. “Maybe the director wouldn’t need to keep a sleeping bag under his desk.”
A lack of project management was the biggest difference Hays found, but he also pointed out that Japanese developers are working with more limited resources than their counterparts overseas. “Japanese devs are really harmed by the lack of a Japanese Stack Overflow.”
Because in English, if you Google a programming problem, there is an answer. And in Japanese, you Google and it’s just some random guy’s blog where he’s like, ‘Hey, I tried using Unity for the weekend and here’s what I found out.’ So there’s much less centralized information and information exchange between developers.
The upside of working on games in Japan
For some developers, the best part about working in the Japanese game industry is the games themselves.
“My favourite thing about game development in Japan,” said Metz, “are the cool projects and opportunities it brings, which was also the biggest reason for me to move here. Japan is well-known for its famous games from Nintendo, Sega, Square Enix, and countless more. There are a plethora of opportunities in this country and that really excites me.”
Hays concurred.
I literally made a game with Yoshi. I would never, ever get that here [in the US].
Hays and Metz agreed that collaborating with their coworkers proved an incredible perk. “Like I said,” Hays told me, “some of the people who started the company were super veterans and were incredibly knowledgeable. And it was really awesome to get to work with most of the people, [though] not all of the people. So experientially, it was great.”
Trudel has also enjoyed working with Japanese game developers.
They know all the games through and through. They have really pointed opinions on what they think is good. . . . It’s a craft for them. It’s something they dedicate their life to.
Sometimes, that dedication proves almost uncomfortable, at least for Nguyen. “The games I had worked on were all 18+. . . . During the title alpha/beta release they made the whole company playtest it. I had to play through explicit content along with the surrounding people.”
Still, he was impressed by how wholeheartedly they tackled each project. “For an adult game title, the people around me were extremely serious and very committed to making the game become a hit. That was a unique feeling and experience for me.”
It’s a bit different for Mathieu Siboulotte, working at a small studio with an international team. “So far, the working environment in my studio is kind of unique. We almost never do any overtime, we have some flexible hours and some remote work days. We are a very small structure of only four people, so we kind of come when we want and leave when we want, as long as we do our hours! For my project, my team is split between France and Japan, so my hours are mostly in the late morning until the evening, so we can share many hours together!”
But like the other designers, he draws inspiration from his colleagues. “I regularly join a meetup of French game devs in Japan or the Tokyo Indie Game Show in Akihabara. It is great to test new prototypes and connect with people there!”
The downside
As for the downside of game development in Japan, Trudel mourns the vanishing culture of mentorship. “I feel like this is kind of getting lost in Japan,” he explained, “that senpai [older mentor] that’s going to take you under their wing.”
Maybe it’s specific to the game industry, but I’m starting to see there are not a lot of people that even want to take those responsibilities—or for those who do, sometimes it’s going to be a bit more of a power trip.
In general, he explained, game projects in Japan tend to lack both money and expertise. “They’re all built on custom engines, yet every R&D project is underfunded. And not only is it underfunded, but they just can’t find the resources to really do the job to bring their technological assets to the next level, right?
“It’s true in R&D, and to some degree it’s true for game-making proper as well, where they don’t quite have the technical abilities to really fully [realize] their creative vision. So that’s really where we [Wizcorp] come in . . . to try to fill in the gaps.”
Hays also noted the lack of good leadership.
The mentorship wasn’t great, and people I was supposed to be seeking advice from as more senior engineers often were senior because they’d been there a while, and not necessarily because they were incredibly knowledgeable or good at passing that knowledge along.
He explained that “Right after I worked on Woolly World, I worked on a game that was on mobile and on Facebook, and that was part of our foray into self-published first party IP.
“It was me and one senior dev. He was doing all of the client stuff, I was doing all of the server stuff. It was in Unity, which I had used in school, and the backend was on Google Cloud Platform, which I had also used in school. And we approached a milestone that was like, it should be playable by now. We got to a point where the server was stood up enough and the client was stood up enough that they should connect and you could actually experience gameplay.
“And we turned it on and the client performance was so bad, it was unplayable. And I turned to the senior dev, who, again, has been in the industry probably since I was born. . . . I was like, ‘Did you run the profiler? I looked at the profiler. . . . ‘It’s going crazy doing all of this sprite rendering, but it looks like you wrote this rendering code.’
“He’s like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s how you have to render the sprites.’ No, it’s a game engine. It does that. You didn’t need to do this. And so again, as the only server engineer, I had to take several weeks to rewrite the client because he had no idea what he was doing and didn’t attempt to find any of this information.”
In general, Hays found, the emphasis on appearances undermined genuine efficacy. “Shortly after I started, the head of the programming department took me aside. [He said], “People don’t like that you’re leaving on time.’ ‘Am I behind on any of my work?’ ‘No, it just looks bad.’”
This was the same head of the programming department who told me that the company wouldn’t hire female programmers because they would distract the male programmers.
“Never mind the fact that probably 30 to 40 percent of the company is women,” Hays said. “The art department had no problem hiring them. The design department was fine. It was just the programming department.”
Nguyen confirmed that most game developers in Japan fit a narrow profile: young, unmarried, and willing to put in any amount of overtime. “Once you have a family, things change,” he said. “Most game companies’ demographics are single and young people, often with little to no responsibilities outside work, and once your priorities shift from games to family you start feeling like you are an outsider.”
The long hours in particular are difficult to manage, according to Nguyen. “There are crunch times before each release, and this can be stressful depending on how the project is managed.”
My friend and I used to have to work long hours of overtime during the pre-release period. It can suck when people around you have no responsibilities outside work and happily put in the hours while you can’t.
It was these pressures that led Nguyen to switch to a different industry. He also agreed with Trudel that the tech at many game companies is outdated. “There is an inertia to upgrade,” he said. “The most important thing in a game is not tech, it is gameplay and art.”
As for Metz, he mostly would like to be paid more.
My least favourite thing about game development in Japan is probably the low wages. Wages in Japan are a lot lower than in the Netherlands, but I have the impression that programmers have better financial opportunities in other programming industries outside of gaming.
“I have the impression this difference is also not as big in the Netherlands,” he added, “but I could be completely wrong on that.”
Hays encountered the same pay problem. “The pay is terrible. Just for reference, I looked up one of my old withholding slips from 2013, and I was taking home less than 4 million. That is bad. And I tripled my salary by moving back to the US.”
How they got started in the Japanese game industry
Some of our interviewees landed in the Japanese game industry mostly by accident. Trudel, for instance, originally came to Japan for the martial arts. Between 2007 and 2009 he visited Japan whenever he could, for anywhere between a weekend to several months at a time.
“During [one of my longer trips], I would basically be training three times a day, five or six days a week,” he said. “I would just be dojo-hopping basically, to kind of get my bearings in terms of figuring out if I saw something in it. But what I ended up sticking to was basically the classical martial arts of Japan.”
He finally moved officially to Japan on October 20th in 2009, on a working holiday visa. “I didn’t actually have the job lined up when I came in,” he explained.
I had a little bit of money set aside. I figured okay, well, let’s just try to find a job. Now that I’m here [in Japan], I can visit people in person. You didn’t really have Zoom at the time. . . . When I started at Wizcorp, I was hired at the same time as one other person, but I was essentially employee number three.”
“At the time I was hired as an engineer,” Trudel said, “and ended up doing all the IT stuff.” His official title was System Architect and Network Administrator. “And from there, once we started to move gradually into games from 2010, I started to take [on a] technical leadership position.”
Having also served as CTO and COO of Wizcorp, Trudel became the Studio Head in February of 2023. As of now, he’s worked at Wizcorp for over 15 years.
Nguyen also was always interested in coming to Japan.
Our uni curriculum offered Japanese lessons and allowed the credits to accumulate as well, so I had studied Japanese and gotten my N1 even before my very first trip to Japan. A big thanks to my uni, which made this miracle happen!
By contrast, Siboulotte chose the game industry, but not Japan specifically. He started learning game development with RPG Maker when he was 16, but didn’t study game development in university. “I thought joining this industry was impossible,” he said.
Instead, he majored in international trade, while continuing game projects on the side. He then received a bachelor’s degree in cultural product marketing, which gave him the opportunity to join an animation studio as a producer’s assistant.
“However, game development was still on my mind,” Siboulotte said, “so I decided to leave and start university again from scratch, to study game design, in 2017.”
He got his lucky break with Studio No Border, an international creative studio that’s affiliated with the French entertainment group Ankama. “I joined this project in 2020,” Siboulotte said, “right before Japan closed in a lockdown. It was also my first ‘real’ position in the game industry.”
I honestly absolutely arrived here by chance. I was just looking for my first gig after my graduation and internship, and this job happened to be the first one to give me a reply!
“I applied on the website AFJV, a French website listing games positions in France or with French language involved, and after around four months of tests and interviews, I finally got a green light to come to Japan!”
Hays and Metz were both specifically interested in working on Japanese games. While still a college student, Hays spent time in Osaka and loved it. After graduating in 2011, he returned to Japan and was quickly introduced to Good Feel, where he got to pursue his dream of working on Nintendo games.
Metz told me there was a specific moment that clinched his desire to come to Japan.
The final push to want to commit to the game dev industry in Japan was a 2017 GDC talk by Nintendo about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
However, Metz was also well-prepared for the move. “I have always been fascinated with Japanese culture from a young age,” he said, “and have been self-studying the language off and on for around 9 years.”
Their top tips for success
The most consistent advice interviewees offered: learn Japanese.
“It might be obvious for those wanting to work in Japan,” said Metz, “but I think that game development in Japan is much more reclusive than IT companies in Japan and will require a very high level of language fluency.”
Nguyen agreed.
You need to speak a very high level of Japanese. N3 or even N2 might not be enough to collaborate effectively.
From there, however, the advice began to differ, depending on whether interviewees thought that game development in Japan was a good long-term career goal, or whether it should be for the short-term only.
“Be sure to get out of the industry while you are still young and you want to advance your career more in tech,” Nguyen stressed. “The game industry doesn’t usually put as much emphasis on tech as others and it is certainly not a tech-driven industry, so staying there a long time can be detrimental to your career.”
If you value experience working with tech, plan your departure even before entering the game industry. My friend and I struggled a lot when we were trying to jump ship.
Hays concurred with Nguyen’s advice. “Treat it like a gap year,” he said. “Spend three, four, five years doing this because it’s what you really want to do. And then probably take that and go home.”
“I’m not going to say, ‘No, never do it, stay away, don’t touch it with a 30 foot pole’,” Hays also said. “But make sure you understand what you’re getting yourself into and that in all likelihood, you’re probably sacrificing some career progression and certainly income for the sake of this opportunity.”
Above all, Hays believes it’s important to do your research before going in.
I will say as someone who loves video games, loves Japan, loves Japanese video games, if you’re doing it because you have an idealized vision of what working on your favorite games must be like, then you should spend time looking at real-world information.
“Look for testimonials of people who worked at [those] companies, look for information about the pay and the working conditions. Just because it’s your dream doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research the company like you would a company in your home country.”
Trudel also emphasized the need for research beforehand. “Do visit first. Being a tourist is not the same thing as living here, but it’ll give you some idea.”
From there, Trudel’s advice differs, because he’s more optimistic about game development prospects in Japan. It does require, he believes, a great deal of commitment and the willingness to adapt.
Japanese society works very differently. The game industry works very differently. Every client is going to work very differently, culturally speaking, and you need to find a way to acclimate to that, and blend in to some degree.
“You need to be able to find a way to communicate,” Trudel went on, “where it’s going to make things move in the right direction.” It can be tricky, he told me, but “it’s not impossible.”
Japanese ability of course helps immensely: “I mean, the one big mistake that I made was not learning the language enough before coming here,” Trudel admitted. “This set me back some years.”
But language skills aren’t the whole picture. “I know that for me, as much as I struggled with language early on because I couldn’t understand what people were saying. . . . Because I couldn’t understand, I had to pick up on nonverbal cues more and on all etiquette stuff a lot more quickly, just to not get into trouble. Basically, it made me pay more attention to things.”
Language is not enough. Language is just the gateway to the culture, really. From there, you have to walk through it.
“I think a good way to do that,” Trudel advised, “is to engage in cultural activities. It could be sports, I mean, you can go and join a volleyball team for all I care, but having these kinds of activities where you need some form of interaction, some form of communication, verbal and nonverbal, to be able to engage in the activity, will make a big difference.
“Plus it’s going to give you a bit of a network, beyond just having colleagues at work.”
Trudel is strongly in favor of all forms of networking, even before you come to Japan. “Reach out,” he suggested. “I mean, you have LinkedIn, you have Facebook, you have all these social networks where there are some groups for the Japanese gaming industry. Talk to people, ask questions, see what they’re about.”
He clarified, though, that you’ll get better results if you focus on gathering information over clinching a job. “[Those who message me about jobs], every time I’m going to tell them there’s an application process and a candidate selection process, and I’m out of the loop there.
“But if you were just asking about whether you might find something to your liking [in Japan], I’m happy to jump on a 30 minute call with you and try to figure it out and just have that discussion. I’m assuming that not everyone is going to be necessarily as willing to engage like that, but it’s just a numbers game, right?
“You know, the more people you reach out to, the more people are going to answer back, and then you’re going to be better informed.”
Conclusion
While the experiences shared here have been subjective, two of the major points—the low wages and the need for Japanese ability—were confirmed in TokyoDev’s 2024 survey.
So if you’re interested in being a game developer in Japan, it’s best to start studying Japanese as soon as possible (and perhaps to be independently wealthy). But if a conventional Japanese game company isn’t for you, there are also a number of international game studios that can offer a more flexible and English-speaking environment.
If you’re both ambitious and determined, like Siboulotte, you might aim to strike out on your own.
The [Japanese] indie scene looks huge, and it gave me the will to make my own indie game besides work. I am really looking forward to BitSummit in Kyoto to try and show my prototype at a big fair again!
Wizcorp and other game companies in Japan are hiring now, so check out our game development jobs page.
Want to hear more experiences? Continue the discussion in our Discord community.
.png)
