Uh, wrong.  The Japanese industry has stagnated, and is getting worse.  Western developers sank untold levels of depth, creativity, and immersion into RPG's with detailed conversation trees, a wide variety of choices, and new levels of player interaction with their virtual world.  Japanese RPG's at little advanced over the level-grinders and laughable anime-hued storylines from 20 years ago.  Rather than being a part of the story, in a JRPG, players view the story.  Meander through commands to watch canned animations in repetitive battle sequences, and watch characters talk.  In a Western RPG, the player is actually involved in every aspect of the story.  The conversations, the decisions, and the action and battles.  

Japanese developers are still putting out laughably archiac games with shallow gameplay and nonsensical anime storylines while hitting time-worn cliches left and right.  Look at Ninja Gaiden II or Metroid: Other M.  Mindless stories, awful characters.  They seem to think that mature storytelling is "having lots of boobs and violence" (the staple of anime) rather than what is actual mature storytelling--a focus on plot, narrative, and character development.  That's what you find in Western-developed games.  Grand Theft Auto, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, BioShock, Alan Wake, Eternal Darkness, and the Retro-helmed Metroid Prime games.  The focus was on putting gamers into the shoes of the characters, being the characters and living the stories.  Exploring their environments, etc.  

Ninja Gaiden II and Metroid Other M treated women as objects, and both games, very sadly, still injected the over-done "damsel in distress" storyline.  Made all the worse in Metroid having to watch the once strong and resiliant bounty hunter constantly needing to be rescued by "tough-guy" male (space marine) stereotypes.  In Ninja Gaiden II, not only was the damsel-in-distress little more than exactly that, but she was dressed ridiculously and shallow as a dry lakebed.  

Western developers have been advancing their games and stories, while Japanese developers continue to just hammer out retread after retread.  Almost every single Zelda and Final Fantasy game has the exact same plot as the games that preceeded them, with rare exception.  Rather than an ever-evolving storyline, the way Halo or Gears of War continued to move forward, they just put out the same thing over and over again with slightly different bells and whistles.  Worse, Japanese developers like Square-Enix and Nintendo continue to flood the market with untold numbers of remakes and retreads or straight ports.  Hell, Nintendo is marketing their new game system with two remakes.  And one of them, Ocarina, has been available half a dozen times on three different game systems so far.  

Western developers are the reason the reason the industry continues to grow.  Japanese developers have been stagnating for a while.  Many of them are starting to realize it, as the total "back to the drawing board" upcoming Devil May Cry shows.  Some Japanese developers are willing to start growing up.   

I'd say the definition of hardcore games are moving away from cut scenes and story and becoming strictly online multiplayer FPS.  As others said, "dudebro" games.  Personally, I enjoy the cut scenes and story aspects of some games as well as the raw gameplay.

But yeah, I feel more at home with the Japanese style games than the Western ones.  Western games have their own set of cliches as well.  Ethnocentric thinking makes us ignore those cliches and assume that Japanese games are the only ones that have them.  For Western games - middle aged shaved bear protagonists, LOTR / Star Trek / Star Wars influences, shallow moral decisions, realism over creativity, etc.