This isn't about just Konami but the direction of Japanese publishes in general: It's easy to understand how Japan has turned so heavily towards mobile after turning so heavily towards dedicated handhelds for a while -- It better suits their lifestyles. But one other factor I've started to realize is that the Japanese mobile game market is a little bit less shitty than the one we're experiencing, in multiple ways.
For starters,
a higher proportion of players pay over there, and they seem to be willing to pay more. I've read from multiple sources that more mobile revenue comes from there than from the US, and that Japan is pretty much no. 1 in the world for mobile revenue. A new bit of information I've got is that the percentage of mobile gamers in Japan who pay is something like 5-10 times that of the US. (
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1047418) "Conversion rates" for F2P mobile games in Japan sits somewhere around 15-20% of players. That's not whales, but people who pay in general.
Also, whenever I look at previews of Japanese mobile games and their top charts, I see a lot less shovelware and a lot more games that at least look like they had a degree of care put into them.
Just look at Rampage Land Rankers for one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=91&v=KoXfpK9RrgcMaybe this game just looks sleeker than a Gameloft game because Tetsuya Nomura did the character designs, but it at least suggests Japan is putting its A-list people on mobile games instead of throwing out a bunch of trash and cloning it. That video doesn't look too dissimilar from what we were playing on the DS seven years ago. I'm looking at other stuff in magazine scans like Kingdom Hearts Unchained, Rise of Mana, and so-on. Some of them are games I'd consider giving a look if they got localized. They still look like gambling games sure, but they at least seem to have some production value put into them. Another theory is that only a fraction of international games get released in Japanese, which means less of the global shovelware choking up the Japanese iOS and Google Play stores.
This all could just be another sign of East Asia continuing to be ahead of the curve when it comes to the quality free-to-play games. On PC western F2P games are just recently getting around to where they were a few years ago.
