I mean that that's why there are so few jRPGs left from the rich and plentiful numbers we had back on the PS2.

It's because the Japanese market isn't large enough to deal with the massive increase in the cost of game development

Right. Which was also a part of what the PS3 set-off as many of the old devs from the PS2 era threw their development behind the PS3 and Sony, which turned into a budgetting and coding nightmare under the Cell processor. M$ didn't help by fronting huge sums to certain devs for games that also pushed "expectations" and "expected fidelity and budgets" to new levels.

Had the PS3 not been such a clusterfuck at launch with Sony's push for the (dead end) Cell and (now surviving) BluRay, more dev studios could have possibly transitioned better over the long run, and not just giant studios like SqEn surviving because they had the funds and name recognition.

It's not just the PS3, the cost of development has risen on all platforms. The PS3 was worse than others in some ways, but if you focused on the system it was fine. See Naughty Dog, they worked efficiently and focused on the PS3, which meant that they could produce Uncharted games for reasonble sums

The issue isn't just the hardware when Square Enix is taking 10 years to make a game

Naughty Dog had backing of Sony and are machine devs, so for them neither money nor the Cell architecture were huge hurdles. That's not a normal developer just as EAD is not a normal developer, they are the creams of the crop and work inhouse for a good reason. So your comparison is incredibly flawed, we're talking about outside devs which used to generate the bulk of content.

Japanese devs did focus on the PS3, did you not read how I even said that many threw ther lot in with the PS3's success but that ended up backfiring because of the collosal disaster that was the PS3's launch year and subsequent tumuptulous recovery which amounted to Sony effectively giving away a WiiU's worth in money with each PS3 purchase. So not only did you have a chaotic and unpredictable market, you also ended up with some of the most bizarre and dead-end technology at the core of the console ever because Sony was trying to push their own agenda with the architecture and the bluray. This sent budgets skyrocketting for pointless reasons due to the architecture and that caught devs completely in the blind. It wasn't just budgets growing because of HD, it was budgets exploding because of stupid design decisions in the heart of the console that many developers were backing. M$ didn't help this at all because they started throwing around huge sums of money to big names to secure franchises, which let budgets grow and expectations along with them. The entire home console market nearly imploded in Japan, and it never needed to happen but it did.

SqEn is a special anomaly of oddity in an of itself.

Uncharted 1 and 2 were made for approximately $20m. That's all I'm trying to say. They're a well run studio and the Japanese studios clearly aren't (comparitively). Other companies can make games cheeply and too a high quality, but they require good management

The Cell was part of the problem, but it definitely wasn't the whole problem. The PS3 was nearly fantastic at launch, but the price was too high and the power difference not quite large enough to really have an impact. But it's not like every console before then had been simple like a PC (as we have with XB0/PS4) they'd all been unique. It's not like Sony did it for the sake of it, they genuinely thought that it could be a revolution. Though yes, it wasn't

The home market in Japan "died" because they didn't buy consoles because there weren't games and the price. That's not just the fault of Sony, the Japanese developers failed in a way that Western developers didn't. Don't ask me why, but it's not all down to the Cell and M$ throwing around some money

Like I said, Naughty Dog are just a bad comparison as would be a comparison using any of the ED branches to compare to some random third party developer. These are cream of the crop guys who have huge institutions backing them.

I really wouldn't call the PS3 fantastic in any sense of the word. Unmitigated disaster is more appropriate because of all those reasons you listed: price, cell, and lacking power differences to competition. :P

The reason there weren't games and the high prices was because of Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's money tossing. The barrier to entry was huge on one end, and on the other you had M$ buying out exclusivity on a console that wasn't all that appealing. Which left the home market with either a huge paywall (PS3) or a foreign, unappealing console (X360) for HD gaming. No where to go but down, and that's what happened.

Why shouldn't we care, that's the actual budget for the game. It's not about the huge institutions, it's about the management of the team

Well the games that the PS3 produced were great, other than from Japan (Lost Odyssey is my "Japanese game of the generation"). My point was that if it has been more powerful it really could have moved gaming further forward than the 360, but few people truly took advantage of it and let the 360 be the lead console, then do terrible ports

Once you work out how to develop for a console, the next game becomes easier. With Sony's name, the PS3 was always going to do well and if they were sensible, they'd know that the best thing to help it along in Japan would be Japanese games. But Square Enix, for example, just couldn't work this out and managed to release 3 jRPGs which weren't great... and all featured recyled content from the previous game. The best (non-Eidos) Square Enix games for PS3 are without a doubt Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 & II.5 and Final Fantasy X HD. Just imagine if we'd got anything like X, X-2, XII, KH I, KH II. But we got XIII, XIII-2, Lightning Returns.

They needed to make that first investment to increase the user base and help them work out how to make next-gen games. They just did a really bad job of it. I'm focusing on Square Enix, but the others are just as culpable

Why is people saying that Jrpgs are ending and that this will be the last one on consoles?... come on for the PS4 FIRST year we already have: Persona 5, Neptunia VII, Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force, Omega Quintet, and a BUNCH of other japanese titles like, Disgaea 5, God Eater 2 Rage Burst, Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Onechanbara Z2, Dragon Quest Heroes etc.

and it is OBVIOUS that the Tales games will eventually come to the PS4 afterall their main fanbase is on PS... just look at how thing have been lately, almost every exclusive Tales game for the xbox or Nintendo has come to the PS3 (or a PS console) and they normally sell better on it, Tales of Graces (Wii) global sales: 220.000 and then Tales of Graces F (PS3) 880.000...

Tales of Vesperia on PS3 didnt sold as much as the 360 version but it never came to the west and even then it sill sold 400.000+ copies versus the global 600.00 copies of the 360 version.

Tales of Symphonia Chronicles a collection of the Symphonia games came to the PS3 and Tales of Hearts is now coming to the PS VITA, plus the last THREE mayor Tales game have been exclusive to PS, Xillia, Xillia 2 and now Zestiria.

thinking that there wont be a PS4 tales game in the future is madness, even if the system doesnt do well on japan the Tales games do sell well on the WEST.

Plus on this interview Hideo Baba said that "for the moment the strategy is to release Tales Of games only on PlayStation" and i doubt he is just talking about Zestiria for the PS3 after all he said Tales of Games in plural... there must be more games to come in the future after all i doubt Zestiria will be the last tales game.

20 million is a huge budget, though. Take a look at EAD's budgets, tiny by comparison, and you expect a third party dev of a small studio to keep up with ND's 20 million? That's a huge sum of money and would require huge sell through for the studio to return to profit after you cut off all the publisher, console dev kit and royalty, and store front fees. Uncharted 1 and 2 could fit under that umbrella because the engine was built under the weight of the first with the funding of Sony to back it up, the second being noticably cheaper to produce as one juge price point is cut off. A normal, small third party AA studio isn't going to muster the millions out of nowhere just to get the first game out... especially not for a limited genre like jRPG.

The problem really is in the detail of getting that first game out and not tanking because of it; which is exactly what didn't happen. Games just became unaffordable to make for the smaller AA studios, and everything went AAA or bust (or small indie), or went to handhelds where budgets were much more manageable and not on some arcane architecture. So, while I agree that once a game is made and the system set you would produce more easily long term, a lot of that "first" never came. Just look at all the problems Atlus has had...

(Also you forgot that shitty Star Ocean game we got...)