Now GTA IV was developed in Edinburgh, with the help of the Rockstar games head office in New York. The writers themselves are based in New York, and so I think it only fair to consider it a western game.

If you look at the list of good selling franchises released by American publishers against the list of good selling Japanese games, and the US list is just going to win every single time. I haven't made a full list, because I have better things to do, but those are the first franchises that come to mind, but the key one is CoD, that alone sells 10 million every year. NFS sells 5m, Madden sells 5m FIFA has surpassed PES. There are plenty. On the Japanese side, most of the big sellers come from Nintendo, and then Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and PES, no others are that big

REsident Evil is that big too!

And MGS4 is basically at 5 Million!

And then we have the monster Gran Turismo!

Thats 3 more I added

Besides Nintendo and SCE?  Level-5, Game Freak, Cooking Mama Inc, Capcom, Hudson, Square Enix, Team Ninja, Sonic Team, Sora, Intelligent Systems, HAL, Clap Hanz, Sega, Dimps, Altron, Tose... many of these companies have had games this generation that sold more than Epic's Gears of War titles in fact.  

Again, Japanese developers haven't "fallen behind", they've more tripped sideways and now largely focus on a different market (DS/PSP/Wii). For the platforms that JP devs really focus on, their games are also unmatched technically.  Western games on DS/PSP/Wii by in large look like utter shit.  Why can't western devs compete?

most of those games mario and nintendo games. As much as I like those games,your list really does'nt say much in my opinion. Don't get upset,I'm just giving my opinion.

besides COD,halo and gta theres not that many big wester seller

gears around re5 and mgs4(in sell)

uncharted,killzone,mass effect and assassin's creed

are pretty average too (in sells)

the only thing. its that this gen western developers have been rising

probably bcuz shooter gettin so popular

Japan is doomed.  (unless they liscense my Engine.)

He may or may not be right.  However everything he said, just like everything epic always says was just designed to sell more engines.

This is the main point. It's the conundrum of Nintendo's non-competition, but played out in the 3rd party sphere. Sony and Microsoft say Nintendo can't compete, but it's simply a matter of them having a different focus. The same goes here. Everyone howls about how Japanese devs have lost their way, but the only sphere where Japanese devs are behind is in PS3/360 development, which is the smallest userbase pair of consoles you can stitch together. Go on to Wii, DS, or PSP, and you'll find that it's almost exclusively Japanese developers making games worth buying, and even the PSP which is derided as a dying platform can point and laugh at either PS3 or 360's install base.

It just shows that there's a fundamental split happening between the self-proclaimed "hardcore" and the rest of the industry. In the world of the former, PS3/360 and Western developers are king, in the other world, Wii, DS, and PSP have the numbers, and the Japanese are the clear leaders.

I like it when people don't read a thread before posting

Seriously it is like these companies do not exist, when it comes to talking about Japanese Video Game development. (I am not talking about cliff quote but more so the general view).

You can't just look at individual titles, you have to look at franchise sales as a whole.

So we get a Gran Turismo game every 3 or 4 years, that sells 10m copies, but we get a CoD game every year selling that amount.

Resi sells well, about 6m for the last one, but it is so infrequent again.

The key thing for publishers like EA and Activision (and Ubisoft for Assassin's Creed) is they are producing yearly games which are selling these numbers, the Japanese publishers are taking a few years over each game