Oh absolutely. Ubisoft's whole structure in particular is a basic text book on how NOT to structure team-based development of creative projects. It's got it all: constant interference from non-creative entities outside the team, teams that are WAY too big, lack of creative freedom, and they take it another step further by having devs not be fired but shipped off to an office where they just sit, doing nothing, being paid to just waste away until they're needed on some other random project. I mean, look at what Monolith Soft, CD Projekt Red, and Bethesda Game Studios accomplish with fewer devs and less money (though BGS is getting pretty big now).

The reason this doesn't come up as much until recently is because most of your BIG 3rd party western studios produce games that consistently sell well. The developments of CoD and AC are ridiculously inefficient but they sell enough to offset it so it doesn't really matter. Japanese devs that make the same mistake often don't have the same luxury.

TallSilhouette said:

Capcom, Square Enix, Sega, Konami, when I think of companies struggling with budgets and/or sales targets I don't think of the West. Our budgets may be sky high and business practices often very low, but one way or another we usually get that return.

And to two of the companies you mentioned (Capcom and Square-Enix), notice how these problems started arising after they began taking on more Western business models when it came to game development.  SEGA and Konami honestly had their own problems apart from money management.

Somehow I don't think it's just a Western issue. Not if Japanese budgets and cancellations have anything to say about that.

Devs want to utilize hardware as well as possible (probably for both professional/artistic reasons as well as perceived competitive advantage), which coupled with much more powerful hardware and HD resolutions led to much higher development costs. It seems that not going that extra mile to squeeze that little extra bit of power from hardware actually saves a lot in costs.

Do you have a source for that? Because I would think that EA sells more software.

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Persona 5 was released in 2014

I would say yes, since development costs are generally lower for Japanese games, but I'm not too sure

Im sure EA or other devs have topped them in certain years, thats besides the point though, Nintendo sells a shitload of software and has many multimillion selling franchises so its odd to use them as an example of a company that can survive without massive selling software.

Sadly some very talented studios were crappy sometimes at managing their budgets but even more often at setting priorities to allocate available development time, often adding too many features to be implemented in time and missing important launch windows or letting the hype created by marketing die before launch, some of them didn't survive, some were taken over by big publishers, some, together, even managed to sink their old publishers that were taken over by other publishers or saved themselves with mergers. But this happened in Japan too, not just in Europe and USA.