Wasn't handheld gaming already bigger than console gaming in Japan? So games for "core gamers" moving to mobile isn't as farfetched as it would be in America right now.
part of it is development cost keep rising. back in the day a Japanese developer could release a game and sell 500,000 and be good but now developing that kinda title and selling that isn't worth the investment to them. especially in the face of just making a cheap mobile game that almost instantly produces profits.
out west the attitude is different at the moment. there's this whole swing for the fences AAA attitude and if its not that its an indie game. that middle ground of gaming that used to exist between that is vanishing rapidly. they can't do a modestly budgeted game that doesn't push the hardware and sells modestly but is a financial success. of course the EAs and Activisions and Ubisofts are always looking for that next big thing and they'll back a new IP but a studio may just get one show and if they game doesn't do crazy numbers they're shutting their doors.
western developers are mainly hovering around a limited selection of genres now. mostly first and third person shooters. every year there's gotta be a AAA shooter that comes out around Christmas. be it Halo or Killzone or Call of Duty or Battlefield. its been a few console cycles of this. at some point their bread and butter shooters are bound to collapse and then what?
it wasn't that long ago that Tomb Raider came out and sold like 3.5 million in the first month and Square Enix was crying that it was disappointed in the sales.
http://www.vg247.com/2013/03/27/ana...00-million-needs-10-million-sales-to-succeed/
