Will Japan matter?

[ookaze]

Of course Japan matter.
The only people doubting this are Xbox owners probably.
That's because they are the only ones with a skewed vision of reality.
The XBox 360 is full of western, I should say american centric, games. But to a point you'll be sick of it. It has loads of FPS and racers and american sports, and Xbox 360 owners gobble these up till they're blue in the face.
Just look at the games always cited for this console, just look at the MS stats on most played games. Then, there's another skewed vision of XB360 owners because of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that the "best" reviewed games, those with the highest scores, are western. Which should always have been the case, as the reviewers that give these scores are mostly westerners, and what's worse, mostly from the USA. With the XB360 having one year headstart, I'm not surprised at the situation at all.
But it created this strange delusion that Japan doesn't matter anymore.
Nintendo just proved that's not the case, at all.
And I rather think that the japanese dev time is finite, and that there's a big mistake made from most hardcore gamers I read or hear about: they know the handheld and home console markets are different, but they have this strange idea that handhelds are not consoles.
The problem is that handhelds still are console, and even if easier to develop, games for handhelds still need developers to make them. And these developers are from the same companies as those that make home console games.

Just look at Nintendo: they can't magically make as many home console games if they also have to make handheld games.
The japanese devs just made most games for the most successful current handheld, which is the DS. The support from western devs for the DS is just plain poor, Japan alone made the DS a success. And it's the same for the Wii.
So gaming is still important in Japan, it even has INCREASED, but when people just delude themselves by thinking "handheld don't count", of course, they end up with an erroneous conclusion like "Japan doesn't count anymore".
This is helped by the fact that a lot of those gamers have trouble realizing that even if it's not HD, the Wii counts as a current gen console too.