4. More Digital Distribution and PC Ports
A major hurdle for Japanese gaming is the fact that a whole lot of Japan's current output is anime tie-in games, which happen to be loathed by most game retailers. If you're wondering why, ask yourself what most people associate anime with (some examples in no specific order: tentacles, underage girls, melodrama, over the top everything, pervasive sexuality, bad writing, and giant robots). So it's not surprising that the US market isn't receiving a whole lot of these games, but with digital distribution through venues like PlayStation Network and the Nintendo eShop, fans of Japanese games can get their hands on the latest games that might never hit western shores (assuming there are no region locks and they can navigate the store menus, of course). But now that the PS4 has a PC architecture, Japanese games can take the next step in digital distribution: getting a major presence on Steam. To be fair, there are a few Japanese games on Steam right now, but they are few and far between (and at least one had to go through Greenlight, despite coming from a reputable publisher). That's because Japan has never really had much of a PC gaming community outside of a barely known indie scene and visual novels (basically first person point and click games with no pointing) and missed out on the biggest market for niche games ever. With one major hurdle to PC ports gone (the system architecture), there's only one development hurdle keeping non-Sony PS4 games from hitting PCs worldwide: a lack of PC port experience (as demonstrated by Dark Souls' port). Whether that can be fixed remains to be seen, but with major Japanese publishers like Namco Bandai and Square Enix already testing the waters, we might see more in the future.