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> Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t. I've found this to be strange. Japan has pr

> Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t. I've found this to be strange. Japan has produced some of the best video games over the years, especially in the early days of the industry. Games are some of the most complex pieces of software to create, with their extensive math and real-time requirements. It's never made sense to me how they didn't come to conquer the software industry in general. I used to assume there's a whole world of quality Japanese software that never made it to the USA for lack of internationalization or something. But nowadays with everything open source, I can't point out any particularly visible/noteworthy Japanese projects or developers. It's odd.

leoedin 8y ago
Apparently a huge contributor was the complexity of their written language. English can be easily typed with a keyboard and stored in a 7 bit character. This meant the early computers could still store a reasonable amount of English, and were accessible to people straight away. Kanji on the other hand is exceedingly complex. Computers had to get much more powerful before the systems which allowed typing and reading it worked well. The barrier for entry was therefore much higher for the average person. developers in the Japanese market therefore focused on the areas of computing which didn't require written language - video games.