by OL » Thu Aug 14, 2014 9:22 pm
I don't really know that it can happen again, to be honest. You could almost look at the 90s as the last full decade where the Japanese were making their entertainment specifically for themselves. Head into the 2000s, and suddenly anime became huge worldwide, and as a result they stopped making it just for themselves, and started making more attempts to twist things slightly so they'd also be palatable to other cultures. Sure, it's not true with everything they make, but it became a much bigger trend in how things work. The market expanded, so the target audience widened, and that resulted in a basically different product.
Videogames are kind of a similar case, though the market had always been worldwide for them; it just wasn't worldwide and mainstream. Eventually the technology got more advanced, so things started to become more expensive. And once that got to a certain point, it became much harder to make AAA-quality games primarily aimed at their own country and a niche audience elsewhere; they had to aim much wider to make the financial situation work. And that led to last generation, where in general Japanese games tended to struggle to reach major success, because they weren't quite as sure how to do things anymore.
These are all broad generalizations of course, and there are exceptions all over the place.
OL has received a thanks from: Raithos