Intro
I personally believe that the core of this issue lies in the business environment. North America is a region with a high degree of commercialization, and a game company will go public and introduce investment to expand its scale after achieving certain results.
Details
According to the original expectations, the funds from investors can help the company reduce cash flow pressure, expand production scale, and improve the performance of the next generation of products in the entire market. However, there is no free lunch in the capital market. From the moment of going public, the shares and decision-making power of the original core team of the company will begin to dilute, and the management will start hiring a large number of professional managers, also known as businessmen, to ensure the interests of investors. If the game is not fun and has a bad reputation, it doesn't matter. As long as the stock price rises, these managers will be rewarded, and they can find another job when the company collapses the following year.
This process is almost irreversible and continues until today's EA and Blizzard, where "there is not a single game developer in the management team." At that moment, it is no longer a game company, but just a commercial company with a "game development department." To some extent, companies like Tencent are the ultimate form of this kind of company. Studios like Naughty Dog, stationed in North America, will also be affected in a similar way, choosing to chase media awards to please the investment market at the expense of player reputation.
Of course, this is not inevitable, but the probability of this happening in North America is higher than in Europe and Japan. If Valve were a publicly traded company, there might be more funds injected into the global promotion of the Steam platform, into the commercial operation of CSGO and DOTA2, but there probably wouldn't be milestone-level products like SteamOS, SteamDeck, and Half-Life Alyx.
Discussion
At this point, game companies attempting expansion and globalization should learn from Sony and Ubisoft: how to ensure a focus and tilt towards core gaming business while successfully achieving globalization and commercialization.
This is a complex topic, and Sony seems to have chosen to recruit a global management team that "understands and plays games." Ubisoft has not revealed much external information. However, when I visited Ubisoft Shanghai many years ago, I asked them a sharp question:
"I can see that each new Assassin's Creed game learns from what other games in the industry do well, but how do you ensure that after adding these elements, it still remains an Assassin's Creed game and not just another game with an Assassin's Creed label?"
They told me that there is a committee within Assassin's Creed specifically composed of the core founding team to ensure that every Assassin's Creed game remains true to its essence.
I think, perhaps game companies also need someone to ensure that they remain game companies.