2. Make More Interesting And Better Content
Here's an uncomfortable truth many Japanese game fans aren't facing: there's not a hell of a lot of interesting content coming out of Japan. Sure, if you're a fan anime games or certain Japanese franchises there's probably going to be something out there for you, but for the average gamer, there's not much to catch your attention. It doesn't help that few mainstream video game sites cover Japanese games all that often (from what I've seen, Kotaku is pretty much the only one consistently doing it), but even if you do, you might be lucky to find one game that can stand on its own and be interesting from this year's Tokyo Game Show, that was The Evil Within. To be fair, even the west is struggling to make things standout in a sea of generic and/or uninteresting games after all, how many sequels to sequels or "gritty, realistic" military shooters do we need? But with the new console generation, you get the feeling that western devs are bit more willing to come up with fresher, more interesting stuff things like Watch Dogs, Destiny, and The Division. With Japan, you get the sense that they're stuck in place and making the same things all over again and that their original content (the stuff not based on anime or other media) is pretty thin on genre diversity. All in all, Japanese games seem to make it easy for non-Japanese people to ignore them, because
they keep playing into the stereotypes that have formed in the last decade or so. How can Japan get better content? First, they need to seriously analyze why people don't like their content in the gameplay, aesthetic, and story categories. Second, they need to take more risks on the creative front and play around with the genres they've barely touched this generation (would it surprise you learn that outside of anime based games, there's been a handful of scifi games produced in Japan?). The first step to relevancy is being interesting, and Japan hasn't done a good job lately. If they can't pull it off now, they might never be able to do it.