Japan is seen as the home of games, but the sector is struggling – and China is poaching its talent. It’s a power shift that may change the gaming landscape for good

In September, a quarter of a million people journeyed through Japan’s punishing late-summer heat to the cavernous expanse of the Makuhari Messe convention centre in the industrial hinterlands east of Tokyo. They came for the 27th Tokyo Game Show, which was back in full ostentatious form this year after a pandemic hiatus and a timorous return in 2022. Most came hoping for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet-unreleased video games on display within the show’s 11 hangars. Others hoped to broker deals to have their video game published, or to publish someone else’s.

To step through the front doors was to enter a scene of roaring overstimulation. A babble of tens of thousands of voices clashed with a competing timpani of video game trailers. Queues for some games were closed just 10 minutes after the show opened, having passed their maximum occupancy. All around were competing visions of the future of video games: traditional troll-battling fantasies; competitive shooting games in which the weapons shoot streams of candy-coloured bath bubbles; virtual reality racers played out from within hi-tech helmets; artificial reality dioramas layered atop the world as seen through a smartphone’s camera lens; games filled with supporting characters whose dialogue was written and recorded by AI. (One booth offered a dozen books and manuals on ChatGPT and how it might revolutionise – or rather, cut costs for – the industry.)