Intro
I personally believe that the core of this issue lies in the business environment. North America is an area with a high degree of commercialization, and a game company will go public and introduce investments 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, commonly 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 receive a large sum of money. If the company collapses the following year, they can just find another job.
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 type of company. Studios like Naughty Dog, based in North America, will also be affected in a similar way. In order to please the investment market, they choose to pursue media awards at the expense of player reputation.
Of course, this is not inevitable. It's just that 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 operations of CSGO and DOTA2, but it probably wouldn't have 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 focus and dedication to core gaming business while successfully achieving globalization and commercialization.
This is a complex topic. Sony seems to have chosen to recruit a global management team that "understands and plays games," while 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 the strengths of other games in the industry, but how do you ensure that after incorporating these elements, it 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.