I think it’s overlooked that the big Japanese publishers—including Nintendo—were looking to the West long before Sony’s decline in Japan.

Like they were looking to the west on NES, SNES, PSX too!

I think the other thing overlooked is that Nintendo was disproportionately wrt home consoles losing ground in Japan starting with N64. Nintendo was forced to confront shortfall in the Japanese market long ago and this eventually led to it, with DS/3DS/Wii U doing disproportionately well in Japan.

Iwata Nintendo was intensely focused on doing well in Japan again and this caused Nintendo to anticipate what happened in the first HD generation to their benefit in Japan. It also is why, despite mobile taking so much of their lunch in the next generation, Nintendo continued to build Switch giving Japan a lot of focus—they’ve been a company for the last 20 years trying to make themselves and increasingly console gaming itself relevant in Japan.

With Switch, they’ve built a brand/device that isn’t disproportionately successful in Japan but doing very well everywhere. Nevertheless, Japan and Asia are very strong markets for them and will continue to get a lot of focus in design decisions, I think, rather than a focus exclusively on the revived export business to the west.

Meanwhile, the fate of the big Japanese games, which have to repeat by and large always sought western success, decoupled from the smaller games of the industry that were domestically oriented i.e. the plethora of JRPG, largely a domestically targeted genre. Hence, the fate of Sony decoupled from the fate of the domestic market. Moreover, Sony has not been in a position where it has felt it needs to do better in Japan. It has never been in a point of weakness where it needs to address and refocus efforts on its (formerly) domestic market. So it has ridden out this trend.

Basically, it used to be that putting things out on a leading console in Japan was the same thing as targeting the west, by and large. But it came not to mean that. Switch is no longer disproportionately successful in Japan but it still doesn’t entirely line up with preconceived notions of targeting the west/legacy support loyalty but it is providing a new platform where you can target the west AND Japan.

Final Fantasy was the JRPG that "broke out." Nintendo tried to get DQ to "break out" in the west back in the NES days and SE has on/off tried again after the merger. DQ is still more successful in the west than a lot of JRPG, e.g. it has sold ~1 million in the west a couple times now.

The problem for FF is that while it "broke out" on PSX there are a lot bigger fish in the western console market now than there were back then operating on bigger and bigger budgets and it is chasing them because of its status "elevation" on PSX. Doing so has compromised it in Japan and also led to huge development problems.

I just want to say that it MAKES SENSE to want to play JRPGs... or any RPG on Switch, those tend to be long games and not being tethered to the TV helps a lot in completing them, though anyone who owned a DS/3DS/PSP/Vita must know that already. Now then, being able to switch (heh) between TV and handheld obviously has it's perks too, as we all know, so I think that's why people ended up gravitating towards playing more of those games on Switch. We can add visual novels to this too, reading them on your bed beats having to be playing them on TV. That doesn't mean Sony can't make a comeback without a handheld/hybrid, but they really seem to think Japan is barely relevant to sales nowadays, if 2020's PS5 didn't put them in emergency mode in Japan, I don't think anything will, this year sales may have been better in absolute terms thanks to REVIII, but the attach rate is similarly atrocious and even the PS4 sales are starting to wane, which is obvious considering that many devs already jumped ship to Switch and the rest of the games that come to PS4 don't appeal the Japanese audience enough to offset the decline. Just like the Vita, I don't think Sony will put much effort in reversing this and will let fate decide how things will turn out, which is fine by me because Nintendo is basically winning without doing anything (don't get angry, this is a luigi meme).

You could argue that Sony's current strategy with square and maybe with buying Crunchyroll as well (which could be unrelated overall but there's talk of "synergy") is somewhat of a last ditch effort to retain the jrpg audience, something they always left up to 3rd parties and didn't do much with over the years whilst Nintendo has been silently taking a larger and larger piece of that pie, it could also be argued that since the bulk of the audience switched to handhelds Sony stopped paying attention to it, again relying on 3rd parties while square made sure they always get FF on PS3/4. But FF was also slowly losing its audience.

Nintendo lost so much market share with N64 it kinda spurred them on to react immediately. It could be argued that the worse thing to happen with Sony was them getting so many 3rd parties so early, they didn't have to bother working on weak areas that might hurt them in the future. When it finally hit them with PS3 all the 3rd parties were already locked in
Even if they wanted to pivot huge cracks were forming on the handheld side. And when it hit again with the vita instead of trying to fix those weaknesses they just dropped handheld completely. Which was a big problem long term.

Please Follow me throughout the Internet !

https://anchor.fm/amin-parker

http://open.spotify.com/user/22i6cf7qvnhxurt7jquwydjmi

https://open.spotify.com/show/2Ui9Pkfd8RrLhkplDJeIC0

https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/blog/64-amin-parker/

https://www.nintendolife.com/users/Amin_Parker

https://www.gamespot.com/profile/Amin_and_Azizah/blog/

https://www.ignboards.com/members/amin_292392.96573347

https://www.resetera.com/members/amin_parker.62397/

https://www.neogaf.com/members/amin_parker.820043/

https://www.eurogamer.net/profiles/Amin-and-Azizah

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/Amin_Parker

https://www.polygon.com/users/パーカー アミン/comments#activity

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/Amin_Parker

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/profile/85845/aminandazizah/

https://www.giantbomb.com/profile/aminparker/



#パーカーアミン
#AminParker