The whole world was in a funk at that time because of the 08 crash and people doing things that kept prolonging it which this would influence decision making whether or not to gamble a risk in ANY industry especially video games and movies. Besides video games movies at the time became stale doing the same stupid shit over and over because it was 'easy' to make since people kept eating it up.

he Baltic Sea Index was near zero for a long time and entire ship fleets were sold off or decommissioned the summer BEFORE the 08 depression. It was on various premium business news sites that you had to pay to get the full article but our work place had WSJ so we saw what was happening before most of the public did and knew some kind of shit was going down within the next few months. They don't sell cargo ships for the fun of it!

Unlike the 1920-21 depression we kept adding to the crap and bankers supposedly 'committed suicide' in different parts of the world in 09 by jumping off of buildings and in 2013 the truth came out that they were 'fudging' a lot of records to make the economy look better then it actually was. Essentially cooking the books in order to promote Obama in 2012 that he was 'fixing' stuff when he didn't do squat and it made businesses be scared in terms of future investment. In fact a law was passed that limited the amount of money one could take OUT of the US because so many were jumping ship and renouncing their citizenship meaning they wouldn't be allowed to be US citizens anymore. They were THAT scared.

Nintendo's console gimmick in a way was playing it safe because they were always known as a 'toy' company to their higher investors so they could only do what they were told and were told NOT to compete with the big boys at the time. Sony was one of them since Sony does more then just video games.

In Japan as I said before competition is highly frowned upon which takes too long to get into here and people have bricks in their ears these days anyways.