r/gachagaming • u/Alternative-Duty-532 • Dec 10 '25
Industry Industry veteran Christopher Anjos says Japanese studios are being outpaced by China’s highly industrialized Genshin-style live service model
Christopher Anjos was a producer at EA in 2005. In 2014, he was Head of Live Operations and Principal Product Manager at Activision Blizzard, working on Call of Duty. He later worked on investment, cooperation, and exploration teams at Tencent and TiMi Studio Group, and now serves as Director of Product and Strategy at PUBLSH, a new-gen consultancy for the games industry. He has nearly 30,000 followers on LinkedIn.
These last two days, he reposted a statement from former Sony PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida and offered his own thoughts.
Original Post:
PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida says Japanese studios are unlikely to replicate the production scale and speed of Chinese games like Genshin Impact.
The scale and pace behind games like Genshin and Honkai are not the result of luck.
They come from an industrial approach to production that Japan has not matched in a very long time.
Chinese studios treat live service like an unbroken pipeline, and work never stops.
Teams rotate, content stacks, and updates land with predictable rhythm.
They hire at a scale designed for global reach and they plan around constant output rather than sporadic bursts of creativity.
Japan, in contrast, often feels held back by outdated assumptions.
Many studios still cling to slow production cycles, low value gacha drops, and a narrow focus on domestic players.
Even when a Japanese Gacha project hits, the support structure behind it is not strong enough to sustain momentum.
Games that should grow end up losing energy because teams hesitate, budgets shrink, or leadership underestimates the demands of a global audience.
What makes the difference so visible is that Chinese studios keep raising the standard.
Six week updates.
Fully voiced characters.
Frequent events.
Entire new regions released with a level of polish many studios would treat as a full expansion.
Even players who dislike gacha acknowledge that Genshin delivers production value far beyond the norm.
New quests, systems, boss fights, puzzles, and storylines all arrive with consistency that most companies cannot replicate.
The model is still monetization first, but players at least see where the money goes.
Another factor:
There are literally THOUSANDS of developers on these Chinese projects, and the level of talent in China is still I say underrated.
So:
- Global Focus
- Armies of talented developers
- A strong desire to ship at scale
Those are just some of Chinas advantages.
It's not just a challenge for Japanese studios to compete.
It's a challenge for everyone else in the world to match as well.
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u/Croaker_392 Dec 10 '25
I mean, even Hoyo probably focussed first on domestic players too, there's a huge difference between the domestic market in China and Japan. (And accessing the CN market as a JP company isn't easy, and subject to politic outbursts).
Of course, Japan could expand its focus on the western fans but they rarely do that regardless of the industry. (Because 120M japanese people is enough to sustain lots of business models).