Japanese publishers have not been making cuts When it first became clear that something serious was going on with the games industry, in terms of all the layoffs and the change of direction for Xbox and PlayStation, the quote from former Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata, about why he didn’t lay anyone off when things were looking bad for them, got a lot of mileage on the internet.
Apart form not treating your staff like disposable assets the other thing that seems to have allowed Japan to avoid the problems is that their budgets were already generally much lower than Western equivalents. Sony may have spent $315 million on Spider-Man 2 but I’m sure no Japanese developer has ever worked with that sort of budget before, and that’s why they don’t have to lay anyone off at the moment.