According to Eurogamer.net, former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida, in a December 2024 interview with 4Gamer, stated that Japanese developers “can’t replicate” the production speed of Chinese studios like miHoYo, the creator of Genshin Impact. He specifically pointed to China’s environment for hiring large numbers of personnel willing to work long hours as a major competitive advantage. Yoshida noted that legal problems in Japan would also make it difficult to operate like miHoYo. His comments come just a month after major Japanese publishers, including Bandai Namco and Square Enix, united under CODA to demand OpenAI stop training its Sora 2 AI model on their copyrighted works without permission.
The speed gap is real
Yoshida’s admission is pretty striking. Here’s a guy who helped build PlayStation’s first-party studio system, and he’s basically saying the old playbook is getting outrun. When he talks about Chinese studios being “quick at changing personnel” and the whole development process unfolding “rapidly,” he’s describing a level of operational agility that’s hard for more established, tradition-bound Japanese companies to match. It’s not just about throwing more bodies at a problem—it’s about a fluid, almost modular approach to team structure that can pivot on a dime. That’s a huge edge in live-service gaming, where player feedback needs to be integrated yesterday.
Culture and law as barriers
But here’s the thing: Yoshida isn’t just praising Chinese efficiency. He’s subtly pointing to the darker side of that “amazing” speed. The phrase “who can work long hours” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In Japan, there are already strict laws and a growing cultural movement against excessive overtime—the infamous “karoshi” (death by overwork) is a national concern. So even if a Japanese studio wanted to brute-force a project with crunch, they’d face legal and social backlash. miHoYo’s model, as Yoshida implies, operates in a different regulatory and cultural landscape. It’s a competitive advantage built on a foundation that Japan, for better or worse, has largely rejected.
A broader industry anxiety
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Look at the other news: Japanese giants like Square Enix banding together via CODA to fight AI training on their IP. It feels like a defensive move from an industry that’s feeling pressure on multiple fronts. On one side, you have Chinese studios outpacing them in scale and speed for massive, ongoing games. On the other, you have AI threatening to disrupt the very craft of content creation. The Yoshida interview and the CODA letter are two symptoms of the same anxiety: a fear of losing control over the means of production in a rapidly changing digital world.
So what’s next?
Can Japanese studios compete? I think Yoshida’s being realistic, not defeatist. He’s saying they can’t win by trying to copy the miHoYo model directly. The legal and cultural walls are too high. The path forward probably involves leaning into their historic strengths—incredible artistry, deep storytelling, and meticulous polish—but finding new, smarter production pipelines. Maybe that involves embracing AI tools *they* control, or pioneering new collaborative models that don’t rely on crunch. Basically, they need to innovate in *how* they make games, not just in the games themselves. The race isn’t over, but the rules have definitely changed.
