My sarcasm radar is bad so I have no idea if it's a joke.

Touhou is the biggest and father of most doujin (jap indie) games (Shmup ranchise). He made the first game because his instrumental music was not selling because jap wants vocals, so he put is music in a shmup so players would be forced to listen to and like his music. He published it under creative commons.

The game was a success and there was a sequel. The music was particularily appreciated, and as it was under Creative commons, a lot of covers started to pop up. There has been a sequel a year since then (15th installment coming august 14 at comiket 88) and the franchise is the most represented at every comiket since then (jap comicon) because creative commons and lolis shooting lasers with great OST. Zun is known for loving beer.

Well that's understandable, also official english release never lol.

Though if you like Fighting games the spinoffs he made with Tasofro are really good (Touhou 7.5, 10.5, 12.5, 14.5)

Youre wrong the low yen and the fact that japanese games are selling well in the west is more than enough reason to put your money there. Japanese artstyle is way suprior to the west

China Investor is ready to invest, 

Seriously, thanks to China video games ban lifted, many prospect a head, not just increasing sales of consoles and mainstream video games, but a chance of China people investing on Video games is one of the reason why it's really a big news. For an example as soon The Video games ban lifted, Keiji Inafune kick starter project "ASH" get a private investor from Chinese company. 

I never understand why Japanese publishers so often go ahead and develop titles without any intention of localizing them.

Even for many niche, very 'Japanese' titles, western sales tend to outpace Japan.

They put 80% effort into 20% of the market. It probably ought to be the other way around.

The only example I could find was Atelier Rorona. As it's the only example in the series, i'd say it's just undertracked in japan.

the sucess of the xbox 360 is to be blamed for that imo, the ps3 was only sucessfull in japan. Now japanese devolopers can concentrate only on ps4 which saves them more money from multiplat costs and can sell everywhere. Nintendos wii didnt help either as it was too underpowered so a lot of japanese devolopers focused on that instead AAA