Are Japanese Video Games Making a Comeback?

I mean, can you give any example of Japan "falling behind"?

I'd say Nintendo's downgrading from supergiant to regular giant to cult company status is a good one. Although I'd say a lot of perceived falling just comes from blunders on the companies that region's video game industry's fault.

Mostly it's due to Japan wasting time making their own game engines rather than using middleware and less critically acclaimed titles showing up. (Not counting the Big N)

There is nothing wrong with making your own engine from scratch,and there's nothing wrong using already built engine

Can Nintendo really be called a cult company, given the flat-out insane success of the Wii, DS, and 3DS? Like, yeah, the Wii U crashed and burned, but Nintendo made enough money off those other three things to launch three more generations' worth of failing consoles. And the Switch is doing really well, so.

Nintendo isn't a cult company, they just wear the skin of one. It's the corporate version of a hipster affectation (case in point◊). It's all part of their image, their brand.

As someone who wants an Switch but can't buy one because they can't stay on the shelves for anything longer than an week, I feel that it's pretty obvious to say that Nintendo is doing well. Even if the Wii U was an "failure" around 13.56 million units were sold, which means around an few billions in revenue, excluding the various expenses of being an multinational corporation.

Plus there's all these other studios that came out with Persona, Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, Pokemon, and more and I don't see them experiencing an sudden decline in popularity.

So how can the Japanese make an comeback if the majority of their companies didn't really fell behind that much in comparison to the rest of the industry?

I'm with everyone else. Can they really "make a comeback" if they never fell from grace in the first place? They're like video games from anywhere else—they've had their ups and their downs, with very high ups and very low downs.

edited 14th May '17 7:08:48 PM by Midna

By the way, I know this is kinda off-topic, but I noticed most of the big Western console game franchises in Gens 3 through 6 were actually European rather than North American. Tomb Raider, Rare's games, Ubisoft's games, Grand Theft Auto, Hitman, Timesplitters, etc. Even nowadays, while North American devs dominate the Triple A scene outside of Rockstar, Ubisoft and CD Projekt Red, Europeans still dominate the Indie scene, particularly Northern European countries like the UK, Sweden (Especially them), Finland, etc.

edited 17th Jun '17 4:03:41 PM by FireCrawler2002