Art & Creativity Quote by Nobuo Uematsu

Uematsu’s line carries the quiet confidence of someone who helped build an art form and then watched the rest of the world treat it like background noise. He’s not making a dreamy prediction; he’s doing market diagnosis. The phrasing is telling: “still a potential growth market” frames game music less as subculture passion and more as an industry that hasn’t realized what it’s sitting on. Coming from the composer who gave Final Fantasy its emotional grammar, it’s also a subtle claim to legitimacy: this work already supports concerts, albums, and fandom at scale. Japan is his proof-of-concept.

The subtext is about infrastructure, not talent. Japan developed pipelines that let game music graduate into public life: orchestral tours, liner notes that treat composers like auteurs, retail ecosystems, and audiences trained to hear melody and motif as narrative. Outside Japan, he implies, game scores remain tethered to the product - consumed incidentally, rarely collected, rarely programmed, rarely credited in ways that create a career beyond the studio.

Context matters: Uematsu emerged when limited hardware forced composers to write unforgettable themes, not just texture. Those motifs became portable - perfect for concert halls and nostalgia markets - but only if culture and commerce agree to package them that way. His “outside of Japan” isn’t a scold; it’s an invitation and a warning. If the global industry keeps scaling games while undervaluing their music as a standalone asset, it leaves money, prestige, and a whole listening public on the table.