Well, in many ways they seem to do it to a higher standard than Western devs. Not all of course, but generally they are fairly stable and solid. Sometimes they just shit the bed too though.
The other portion is that Western devs seems to have much bigger teams than eastern.

Because... fuck this. Tachikoma proably knows so stop asking random people and direct your questions to her.

If you compare genre to genre Western devs stomp'em in every way possible.

Sports, FPS, sandbox, TPS/A, RPGs, etc... every genre that Western devs have focused on, have taken a big quality leap compared to their Jap. counterparts.

There are lots of crappy games, anime games and sport games that come out yearly in Japan, and there's also western games that take too long like Bethesda games and Duke nukem fotever. There are Japanese franchises that are yearly as well there are western franchises that take long time, I think the op just made an equivocaded assumption... Even the yearly western franchises 2 years development cycle and two teams , so they can release one every year. It's just a matter of perspective. I knwo square enix got in development hell, but it also happens with western developers...

Many Western dev teams have more employees (EA Canada, Rockstar North, Ubisoft Montreal, DICE, Eidos Montreal) and thus can pump out games more frequently.

But there are also a few dev teams that need 3+ years to make a game, like Bethesda Softworks or Irrational Games.

As for CoD, each of their 3 dev teams is making one game, so the cycle has actually been increased from 2 to 3 years per game.

I actually generally disagree. I think the point you are trying to make of games being fun, or good ect, actually falls pretty even between Western and Eastern. What I was talking about was quality, bug free experiences. Games generally run the way they are supposed to without game breaking bugs. This is of course a generalization, but from my experiences with both, that's just how I see it.

EA mostly does Sports, they are in many was doomed because of this.

FPS, it's a complete tie, although Western generally do more of them, and they tend to be pretty solid on the bug side of things.

Sandbox, I cannot agree with at all. The western Sandbox games are some of the worst bug filled messes. You might prefer the likes of FO3, elder scrolls, AC or GTA (mostly the exception) better, but Yakuza and Dragons Dogma from a technical stand point are far superiour. They don't contain nearly as many bugs that can completely destroy the games. The worst offender with this is of course Bethesda, but they are also the main developer of these kinds of games in the West. Of course the west releases a lot more than easter for these kinds of games.

RPG's well, some of the sandbox games mentioned earlier fall into this catagory as well, but the Japanese counterparts again are far more stable. But since JRPG and WRPG are so dissimilar it really just comes down to personal preferance as to what someone prefers.

It really is your issue if you think everything Western stomps everything Eastern and you likely need to expand your scope of view because you are really missing out.

Oh, and i almost forgot, many AAA western games take a long time to release, think about GTA, Elder of scrolls, doom, fallout and anything from Blizzard.

When you think " oh, western developers are faster to develop" just remember two names, StarCraft and Diablo

Because a lot of them don't make games because of money.
They make games because of passion.

I'm not talking about bugs. I never found a gamebreaking bug in any games you mention there.

Japanese games have smaller scopes in terms of ambition compared to Western games in the genres I mentioned.

The games that push gaphical and other technological performances are mostly in the West. They're most likely to find bugs than say a Tales of type of game.

You must of had your head in the sand then. Elder scrolls 3, 4 and 5 all had game breaking bugs. Fallout 3 and new vegas had gamebreaking bugs. Everyone of 'em still have gamebreaking bugs in them. Alot of western games have a lot of bugs day 1 and after a while, there's some bugs. Japanese games in general work day 1. It was extremely refreshing playing dragon's dogma. I could run around for hours and hours, the game just wouldn't freeze or have noticable bugs everywhere. It was a lot of fun.