ZenfoldorVGI made the comment in another forum that the reason he doesn't like and doesn't play his PS3 much is the lack of Japanese style games and JRPGs in particular.  With all the support the PS2 had on that front you would think it would be a no brainer that they would continue that trend but it hasn't really been the case yet, as Zen pointed out the PS3 has had mostly Western support and mostly FPS games and games like R&C:FToD and Uncharted.  It was an interesting point and made me think of why the support is lacking and from a Japanese dev's point of view I surmised these points in my theory:

• There's only around 2 million PS3's sold in Japan, most dev teams shoot for profit and most want that goal of having a million seller, it's very hard to have a million seller with only 2 million systems in their market you would have to appeal to over half the PS3 owners.
• Budget, the economy is going down a bit over there so they can't spend all their moeny on one game to have is look "next gen"
• Risk, they can always come out with a game for the PS3 and then bring it to the states but the things that stand in their way is this, with the small market they have they might not make a huge profit off their game, then they spend a lot of money on translation, voice actors, and everything else that goes into making a game for another region and they might not have the money for that, or they do but they send it out and lose the profit they made in Japan cause it flopped in the NA and Europe.

Those are three big factors into making a successful game and the odds seemed to be stacked against the dev's at this point in time, I really want to see what these JRPG makers and Japanese dev's can do with PS3 and if they ever venture to 360 (or if MS throws enough money their way to make games for 360) it will be an interesting sight when it happens.  For now however there just needs to be more hardware sales there to warrent their risk.

I was thinking about this…..i bet a lot of it has to do with the fact that it still drastically more profitable to make the games for the ps2 yet.
After all that system is still going strong and taking names over there

Right now the Nintendo DS is torpedoing jRPG support for all consoles.

Ya, the PS3 has seen some small Japanese support. (Disgaea, Yakuza, Valkyria, Ridge Racer, etc.)

The Wii has had some support as well, but it hasn't gotten all the games after it thrashed (and is still thrashing) the compeition. Im still wondering why everyone hasn't jumped on board the Wii in Japan.

If i'm not mistaken , isn't the PS3 selling similarly to the performance of the PS2 in terms of hardware in japan ? . I think it would be quite silly to base your support of a console purely on hardware sales it's important that developers are able to predict the future performance of the console aswell and with MGS4 ,Yakuza and Final Fantasy next year it's becoming an increasingly viable format to develop for.

The Wii probably has had a huge influence in poor support for the PS3 , but I don't think that'll deter the developers , if worse comes to worse Sony will have to finance the development of JRPG's mainly by themselves.

 but yeah currently , the PS3 is doing sucky I know I wouldn't buy one if I was japaneese , I'd have a Wii.

Million said: If i'm not mistaken , isn't the PS3 selling similarly to the performance of the PS2 in terms of hardware in japan ? . I think it would be quite silly to base your support of a console purely on hardware sales it's important that developers are able to predict the future performance of the console aswell and with MGS4 ,Yakuza and Final Fantasy next year it's becoming an increasingly viable format to develop for. The Wii probably has had a huge influence in poor support for the PS3 , but I don't think that'll deter the developers , if worse comes to worse Sony will have to finance the development of JRPG's mainly by themselves.

 Actually, I think it's about 3 million behind the PS2 in Japan if we align the launches.

woops I think I was looking @ WW sales.

Million said: If i'm not mistaken , isn't the PS3 selling similarly to the performance of the PS2 in terms of hardware in japan ? . I think it would be quite silly to base your support of a console purely on hardware sales it's important that developers are able to predict the future performance of the console aswell and with MGS4 ,Yakuza and Final Fantasy next year it's becoming an increasingly viable format to develop for. The Wii probably has had a huge influence in poor support for the PS3 , but I don't think that'll deter the developers , if worse comes to worse Sony will have to finance the development of JRPG's mainly by themselves. but yeah currently , the PS3 is doing sucky I know I wouldn't buy one if I was japaneese , I'd have a Wii.

Alligned launches

 http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php?cons1=PS2&reg1=Japan&cons2=PS3&reg2=Japan&cons3=SNES&reg3=Japan&weeks=156

and that's with the PS2 being VERY supply constrained. 

Million said: woops I think I was looking @ WW sales.

Yeah, and I think there's something wrong with the PS2's worldwide sales, it was beating the PS3 severely in all territories at the same point in their respective life spans, and yet it shows them tracking right together.

MontanaHatchet said: Million said: woops I think I was looking @ WW sales. Yeah, and I think there's something wrong with the PS2's worldwide sales, it was beating the PS3 severely in all territories at the same point in their respective life spans, and yet it shows them tracking right together.

It's because the PS2 launched in NA and Europe much later. "Align launches" only aligns the japanese launches.

So the PS3 is still backed by 7 months more NA sales... and quite a few extra months of europes sales as well.

Wii doesn't hasn't stolen all the JRPG support though do to the PS2 hanging on.  There really haven't been many recently announce japan centric PS3 only games that i can think of that hadn't been in development for a while.

FF12 will be the breaking point really.  It needs to really push some japanese consoles... though a lot of Final Fantasy buyers seem to only buy Final Fantasy.  When FF7 and brought RPGs to a higher level of public consiousness only Final Fantasy games seemed to benefit.