Shelved Online Features

"Look at Japan's communications fees," Hisao Oguchi continued analyzing. "NTT's phone charges are billed by the minute. Play a game for two hours, and the online fee costs more than buying a game disc. How many families would be willing to shoulder that expense? A feature developed with a huge investment would end up reduced to a toy for a tiny handful of rich people. This is what Executive Director Nakayama meant by returns and feedback being few and far between."

Shinichi Nakamoto thought back to the last paragraph in Nakayama Takuya's written comments.

"Executive Director Nakayama wrote one very severe line in his instructions. He said Japan's software engineering system has innate flaws when dealing with underlying network architecture. If we force an online game project into production, it will only expose our shortcomings."

"He saw it very clearly." Hisao Oguchi nodded. "Japan's game industry is used to closed hardware environments, used to the craftsman model of polishing single-player games to the extreme. Once we run into projects that require large-scale concurrent processing, server architecture, and continuous network operations, there's a break in our technical reserves. PC developers over in North America are tinkering with TCP/IP protocols every day, while our programmers are still fussing over assembly-language optimization for single-player frame rates. Executive Director Nakayama said Japan's online game technology won't be able to catch up with the United States within the next ten years. Touching it now means taking our own short plank and ramming it into someone else's long one."

Shinichi Nakamoto drew in a cold breath.

That conclusion was overly pessimistic, but on closer thought, Japan's IT infrastructure construction truly did lag behind North America.

"So he would rather make that modem component an experimental internal test project and leave it as technical accumulation than allow