Unnecessary. No need to expand. If they stopped pumping out garbage shovelware than people would still buy there games.

No they're not, that is reactionary and very silly. It's not like they're shutting down their old studios or ceasing to develop and fund the games that Japanese players love so much.

Dude, wake me if I am dead but the Last Remnant and Star Ocean 4 have not set the Japanese market of fire. Both games did not sell very well and not enough to recoup the development costs. Also Star Ocean is an old franchise that usually sales very well in Japan but it did not this time. Like I stated before, their focus on the west is actually hurting the sales of their RPGs. It's not just Square, Namco falls into this category also. Tales of Innoncence sold over 260K units in Japan but instead of being localize they localized Tales of Vesperia which has only sold 290k in Japan and North America. Their decision could be due to them trying to recoup develpment costs but it does not change the fact that they are focused on appealing to the Western Audience.

That is not "abandoning" Japan.

Yeah actually it is. The art style of the Last Remnant and Star Ocean 4 was done to appeal to the west even the choice of platform was calculated in that decision. Secondly, why would Square Enix and Namco support the third place console in Japan when it does not have the fanbase in Japan to make the games successful or make a return on their investment? It's easy to see that they were hoping for sales in the West to pick up the slack. The other two platforms have a larger usebase in Japan especially the Wii, which could have at the least made a return on their investment. Abandoning Japan does not only deal with the lack of focus on the style of graphics and gameplay that appeals the Japanese. It also has to deal with supporting a console that the Japanese are not interested in. The Gamecube which had/has a higher fanbase than the Xbox 360 received very little support from Japanese developers due to the overall lack of interest in the console by the Japanese audience. In contrast the Xbox 360 is receiving a lot of support from Japanese publishers mainly due to their focus on the west.

^i think its more about microsoft paying.

@blackstar

Your signature is incorrect.............Nintendo gave us the PSone.

Just thought I'd share that.

i wanna see their financial reports

Nope.  The prototype design was by SONY.  Otherwise, Nintendo would not have approached SONY about it and just did it themselves without SONY.  If nothing else, Nintendo abandoned the project so no matter how you look at it, Nintendo had nothing to do with it anymore.  SONY didn't have to market the PlayStation, but they did because they could since it was their's.

square square you are digging your own grave.