I disagree, they were often impressive technically but what I feel was at a great cost. They had some great individual programmers but they did not seem to develop technologies that could be shared and amplify and did not value systems or computer science or sharing. Contrast that to say a John Carmack who lifted an entire industry in the west with his thoughtful engineering and complete openness (all ID code was shared and formed the backbone of a lot of other game engines even today). Who is that Japanese Carmack? They had great programmers and great tech but it was hard to scale and they did fall behind. I sense a comeback now. They have swallowed their pride and are using Unreal Engine for example. That's a big step.