Big budgets? Fear of audience rejection? pfff....

With the success of Watch Dogs, Infamous and Titanfall it seems many western 3rd parties capitialized on the PS4 and One's early western success.  Outside of many Japanese 3rd party western devs, their core dev teams have been absent.

Are their fears and absent justified?  I feel that many of their franchises would have been well received in the west and was a perfect opportunity to expand their userbase outside Japan to start the new gen (games like Monster Hunter and Yakuza).  While its not too late, you do not get good chances that often.

Japanese companies tend to be much slower to adapt to new consoles...they go for the large userbase more than the fresh market. Thats just their strategy I suppose. Its how they pretty much always do things.

They're behind the curve on console development as they've been for years now.

Why encounter risk when you can go mobile seems to be the thing in Japan these days.

They're just much slower when compared to western developers, which is stupid, but that's how they are.

No one is forcing these Japanese developers to follow their western counterparts with high budget, high production value games. I'm sure many could have easily created mid-tier games or have two tier (PS3/PS4) games that would work. If I was an exec at one of their companies, I would be more focused on filling in genres/ opportunity to expand than that of I have to spend a lot of money to get this game off the ground. I feel a company like Arc System Works will find success for guilty gear by filling a void (lack of fighting games on Next gen systems). Seems low risk high reward.

Because they are a bunch of directionless has-beens.

The vast, vast majority of Japanese devs/pubs only care about the east. Many only have western sales at all because they licence their games (i.e. Spike Chunsoft; Compile Heart until recently) and so will often get a set amount for the licence which won't really affect how much they'd get from western sales. Which would already be low because of the niche audience in the west.

The bigger publisher are aiming at mobile, both in Japan and abroad, and so the idea of console development doesn't interest them much. There's a big title or two on the horizon (FF XV; Resi 7; MGS 5) but they're going to take time to create.

There's a final, seemingly smaller category of developers with niche audiences but a western publishing arm - Namco Bandai; Tecmo Koei etc. These seem to have been jumping on board to PS4 earlier because they have some western sales to gain. But even then, a company like Namco hires out small Japanese devs to make small-scale games based on animes. They're still targeted at the Japanese market and therefore have little/nothing to gain from PS4 doing well in the west. Handhelds & PS3 will still be their primary market for a while.

I think the vast majority of companies aren't taking advantage of the two consoles. Even watch dogs. Sure it's out for the psx1, but it was built with the ps360 in mind. The only companies that are going head on next gen are Sony and Microsoft. Third parties are going to go the safer rout and make all games for last gen too.... Until the next gen has enough to go exclusive.

This is pretty much what I was going to post.