Koei: "It'll Be Years Before HD Consoles Are Important In Japan"

Koei boss Kenji Matsubara has expressed his opinion that Japan isn't bothered about High Definition consoles yet and it'll be some time before that changes:

“I think it will take some years [for PS3 and Xbox 360] to be a big market."

“The DS is big enough, but the DS has already established a market for third parties. Two or three years ago, only Nintendo could make a business in the DS market, but these days, third parties can make a business. We expect the same situation for Wii.”

"It’s not like it was back in the day, where you could bang out PS2 games willy-nilly and swim around in your money bath."

“It’s back to surviving the market, I think. In the PlayStation days, the platform was only one, but the competition was so high. For PlayStation 3, we have to spend huge resources. In the PlayStation 2 days, we could just focus on one platform, but these days, we have to spend resources on handhelds, popular consoles like the Wii, and high-performance consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3."

“It means that we have to spend too much money and many resources. That’s a challenge for us.”

Very interesting words, while somewhat bold of a statement to make there is a lot of reason to think along those lines.

Source: Gamasutra