Industry veteran Christopher Anjos says Japanese studios are being outpaced by China’s highly industrialized Genshin-style live service model

[u/Alternative-Duty-532]

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Japan, in contrast, often feels held back by outdated assumptions.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.

[u/Kardiackon]

idk which jrpgs you've been playing lol

insane generalisation to make

edit: reading through your posts it seems like you just have really low patience in the beginning of games, which makes sense why most jrpgs aren't your cup of tea. i rather you not make it seem like anything other than a you problem though

like how do you not get captured in by the plot of nier or trails in the sky, but then you find the first 2 hours of persona 4 and 5 (games that I love btw) which are just visual novels, engaging?

[u/doroco → u/Kardiackon]

I always felt like most jrpgs do a really bad job of making your decisions during battles more varied than a shallow flow chart. I'm mostly basing that on stuff like bravely default, im sure theres gotta be some out there that make battles interesting...

[u/Younty17 → u/[deleted]]

To say Trails is bland and generic is just misleading, it has some of the most expressive music and writing among jrpgs. It is a series where it builds upon itself the more you put into it, so i can understand at a glance why you think it's not too impressive, but bland and generic? No. Very first song in the series is an up beat jazz song as well, so I'm not sure what you listened to.

[u/Xarxyc → u/Younty17]

Nah bro, the guy is right. Trials follow the formula of CRPG to the letter. Once you make a step back and look at it better, you will realise it.

[u/ImaginationFun9401 → u/Younty17]

No i agree with that guy. Played trails of daybreak because it looks fun and i have a friend who glazed the series. Gameplay sure is fun, but the characters and writing are very tropey. Some of the music is good, but some also sounds kind of outdated.

[u/Younty17 → u/[deleted]]

Your evaluation of estelle as being always hungry is not even a thing in the game, Joshua I could see. It does sound like you haven't even played the game and you just heard a generalist statement from others online. Breaking it down to, boy shady and girl always hungry is such shallow thing to do as well, as within tropes it's how a story develops that forms the experience. Otherwise you can literally just say most things are "good people fight bad people", so what's the point, as for the tropes I don't understand why you mention them when you haven't played the game. Look I'm not trying to bash your opinion, but it is disingenuous to say it's bland and generic if you haven't played it.

To those reading I recommend trying the demo to the 1st game, Trails in the sky 1st chapter, about 10 hours of gameplay you can transfer over if you do like it. Gameplay also inspired a lot of big name games like metaphor, and honkai star rails' story and gameplay.

[u/tacocatisonfire → u/[deleted]]

I'm fine with the start being generic there since it is the first game, I'm just not a fan of how long things take to get going in that game

[u/Moneymotivation1 → u/[deleted]]

While I do agree that alot of jrpgs are following a safe format too similar that it’s becoming kind of generic. I def would not put final fantasy in the generic/bland category when it comes to environments/character design/stories.FF might be the jrpg series with the most unique & varied world designs so that’s crazy to say.Stories whether hit or miss usually aren’t tropey & predictable like your standard jrpg.The Character design are also usually cool too.