Gloom and doom! It's not only Japanese game developers who are saying Japan's days as gaming's dominant force are over, but so is the mainstream Japanese media. An article in Japan's Nikkei Shimbun, the country's equivalent of The Wall Street Journal, entitled "The Melancholy of Cool Japan" portrayed Japan's declining domestic game industry. As the article pointed out, the top two game companies in the world are no longer Japanese but American: EA and Activision Blizzard.

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DOA Online, gaming's fatal car accident that we cannot look away from, is going into closed beta soon. November 12, actually. The game is being spearheaded by China's Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited and developed by Tecmo's online game development team, "Lievo Studio." That's right, no Team Ninja! The game was originally supposed to be running by the Beijing Olympics. That didn't happen.

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During the Tokyo Game Show 2008, imperial hot Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada voiced concerns about how the West's gaming industry was surpassing Japan's. In a Nikkei Business article on the Japanese gaming "crisis", Wada further explains his position. The gaming industry in the West is growing faster, and developers and publishers have more capital than their Japanese counterparts.

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In early September, Tecmo rejected Square Enix's "friendly takeover" over. Tecmo is currently in the process of merging with Japanese game maker Koei. Kenji Matsubara, Koei president, described how the merger between his company and Tecmo was initiated:

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Tecmo meet Koei. Koei, Tecmo. After rejecting Square Enix's "friendly" takeover, Tecmo announced on September 4th that it was in talks to merge with game company Koei. In an official announcement, it was stated the aim to integrate management was in hopes of creating a "stable and secure environment" as well as respect each other's individuality. The first fruits of that appear to be this plastic folder that shows a polite meeting between two Japanese companies who seem totally uninterested in getting gobbled up by a monolith like Square Enix. Want to know what the back of the folder says?

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The booth companion costume designers at Tecmo haven't deviated too far from the norm for Tokyo Game Show 2008. Heels, short shorts and tube tops are being worn in spades at TGS, with a handful of exhibitors (Sony, for one) keeping it a bit classier on the total amount of less flesh revealed. Tecmo went for the industry standard "nearly naked" look, opting for an extra, gossamer thin layer of tacky, shimmering polyester negligee.

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Tecmo is slated to announce third person shooter Quantum Theory. According to this Friday's issue of Japanese

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The game business is hard. To keep from getting bought up and shore up development costs, Temco is in talks to merge with Koei. Tecmo is best known for its Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden franchises, which should help flesh out Koei's portfolio that is largely dependent on hack-and-slash Dynasty Warriors. Kenji Matsubara, president of Koei, explains this necessity to consolidate with Tecmo:

In the 3 trillion yen ($28 billion) global games market, we have revenue of 40 billion yen, which begs the question of whether we can survive... We plan to make the most of this merger and move on to the next step.

Continuing, Matsubara assures that the recent stock market troubles will not effect the merger.

Koei Plans to Form Holding Company With Tecmo in 2009 (Update2) [Bloomberg via Edge]

Oh Dan "Shoe" Hsu, what dark secrets of the video game press won't you expose? In the latest episode of Behind the Scenes: Gaming Journalism, a report on all the things the gaming press does and has done to them appearing on his and Crispin Boyer's website Sore Thumbs, Shoe explores the seedy world of free baseball games and Japanese escorts.

Editors fly to Japan fairly regularly to visit Japanese game studios. And those studios and their respective publishers will usually entertain these editors -- dinner, drinks...the usual. But I guess flying into strange, alien lands deserves high-end hospitality, so Tecmo in the past has treated their American journalist guests to evenings out at Japanese hostess bars, watering holes where women are paid to keep customers company (not necessarily in a "me so horny!" way...it's more of a "let me keep filling your drinks and you are so funny and handsome and wonderful and let me hang on to your every word!" male-insecurities-nuking thing). Maybe that in itself is nothing shocking, but this part might be: Tecmo has literally spent thousands of dollars giving a very small handful of American editors some lady companionship for one night. Thousands. That's some pricey conversating.

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After rejecting Square Enix's "friendly" takeover, Tecmo announced on September 4th that it was in talks to merge with game company Koei. In an official announcement, it was stated the aim to integrate management was in hopes of creating a "stable and secure environment" as well as respect each other's individuality. Tecmo has announced that on September 17th, a commission was formally set up to move forward with management integration talks. According to the Tecmo release:

A committee has been formed to oversee the business of the two newly-merged companies, comprised of the presidents of both companies (acting as joint-chairmen) as well as executive representatives and non-executive representatives of both companies. This integration will allow employees to demonstrate the full extent of their abilities, so as to best serve the company in the future. This committee is expected to produce a concrete integration scheme for unifying the two companies in the next two months.