Daisuke Ishiwatari Voices Concerns About the Future of Gaming Industry

In recent years, Arc System Works largely became known as a fighting game developer with top-notch animation and art style that captures the appeal of classic 2D fighters.

However, even though that's what they're known for, it's not all that there is to them. ASW has a long history, and that history is much more diverse than you might realize. Their early years were marked with many ports of arcade classics to other platforms. Like Final Lap, Rolling Thunder, Double Dragon, or Ghouls 'n Ghosts, all very different games.

However, at some point you could see that the studio made a big pivot to fighting games that started in 1998 with the original Guilty Gear, and lasted roughly until 2016-2017. Even if the company made some games other than fighters in that period, there were more like exceptions, and often included lower budget licensed titles for various anime shows.

It wasn't until those years that you start seeing ASW develop more original games like Birthdays the Beginning, Jake Hunter Detective Story: Ghost of the Dusk, River City titles, and Code Shifter.

The reason for this might be more evident after Daisuke Ishiwatari's recent interview with 4Gamer, which was partially translated by Automaton. While talking about Damon & Baby, the company's recently released top-down action RPG, Daisuke had a few words to say about the current state of the gaming industry.

"In current game development, localized staff involvement has become a common thing […] It’s very dangerous to spend decades doing highly specialized work, only to realize later that you’re no longer capable of doing anything else. You’ll find yourself at a loss when the project you’re working on hits a rough patch, and even if you quit your job, your chances of finding another one will be slim."

He points out that the joke of some developers spending the duration of the project on simply placing grass is not far from the truth these days. Perhaps he felt that with the company spending so many years working on fighting games, it would be better to go for a bit more variety and allow his team to pick up skills that would be crucial for ASW's future titles and more importantly, their entire career.

Apparently they decided to take a much more loose approach to the development of Damon & Baby, with developers having more freedom but also more responsibilities. Like character modelers taking greater control of their characters, contributing not just the mesh, but also working on their motion.

According to Daisuke, it made giving instructions much easier, and the devs had an easier time coming up with ideas and revisions when given greater creative reigns.

Outside of Damon & Baby, the company has recently worked on "Dear me, I was...", a very unique adventure game that mixes some interactivity and at times feels like an animated movie. This could be another example of ASW branching out to ensure they don't fall into the rigid overspecialization that Daisuke talks about.

It's also interesting to hear how consistent this is to one of the older interviews with Ishiwatari. Cutscenes did an interview with him in 2021 shortly after release of Strive, and near the of the video he talks about his ambitions as a creator outside of Strive.

That's where he points out that the cost of game dev has gone up, and that a game like that is a massive commitment for the team in terms of both time and money. People join gamedev companies with a dream of one day making their own unique game, yet they end up spending years of their life on a specific part of one big AAA project. 

It's incredible to see that Daisuke Ishiwatari has such a long-standing passion to look out for his teams and develop something that's fun and low scale, but allows developers to both learn and express themselves.

Here's hoping that ASW gets an opportunity to continue doing unique and interesting projects for years to come.