Japan are the only people making video games at the moment. Leave smoke&mirrors game design to the west.

That is the biggest problem with Japaneses devs today... try to learn from overseas.

They needs to focus in Japanese style of games like they always have success.

Say that to Resident Evil 5 and 6.

Japanese style brings us a enjoyable background (Not too serious and not too dark).

Gotta love the jacket.

I am a bit confused. When he says "learn" he means "cater to wide demographics across the globe to achieve greater sales"?

Honestly, the worst thing to me would be if all cultures began producing similar lines of thought and design in a medium. To me western games sell more simply because the western market is inherently larger. I think you have to either try to compete in the big pond (which I don't think would work out well) or find your niche in a sub market. Personally I would vote for Japan to do the latter as I like their contrast to the western games that tend to blend to me as I am submersed in that culture.

Totally agreed , diversity in video games bring us more pleasure in playing games   ;) !

Looking at japanese games I got recently or will get soon: Monster Hunter, Code of Princess, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Luigis Mansion 2, Etrian Odyssey IV. Yeah, all full of anime characters in school age as you describe. And all these games are the same.

Not that I agree with ktay. Same here, american games have much more diversity than described.

Could you both stop to belittle games from one of the two countries, that are the biggest in game-development?

I'm unsure about this. Although he is a good game developer, that doesn't mean he is automatically right. Japanese game devs have to learn from the west, to achieve what? Better games? More sales?

I think he targets at the sales. He says:
"Unless at least a few titles from Japan make it to the top 10 games of the year worldwide, we won't prove it."
and
"They know they have to learn more from western games and create games that'll sell more in the western market."

It is all about sales. As a gamer I'm not so much interested. And many game devs are not interested in western sales either. Many japanese devs develop only for the japanese market and don't care about the west. And that's fine. As long as the market can sustain them, there is no reason to change the strategy. And we have games with many cultural differences.

The thing western games make good usually (from big studios at least) is marketing. They learned from the movies-industry and have big advertisement budget, sometimes even exceeded development-budgets. That makes games successful worldwide.

Also I attend movie-festivals here in Berlin, because I want to see movies I don't usually see here in german cinema. We get all the german movies (clear) and the hollywood movies. At the movie-festivals I can see often asian movies, movies from countries other than germany and even american movies not from hollywood. Yes, they have it hard, only hollywood exists, for instance 'Beasts of the southern wild' I probably wouldn't have seen if not for festivals. If all the movies from different countries would be the same as the movies I see usually in the cinema, I wouldn't care for festivals. But the differences are important. So the japanese devs might learn from western devs - but please merge it into something unique, don't copy western games.