My take is that Japan due to their focus on hardware has a very good low-level programming culture that is still relevant for console games. I dabbled with SNES

My take is that Japan due to their focus on hardware has a very good low-level programming culture that is still relevant for console games. I dabbled with SNES programming recently and what Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Squaresoft... could do with assembly in the 90's is very impressive. The failure talked in the article is about higher-level programming and application software.