SEGA Japan In-House Teams was really late to the park on next gen development - that was somewhat helped by Lindberg and the easy of porting the likes of VT 3, VF 5 to the PS3/XBox 360 . But many of their In-House Japanese studios were late and their next gen pipelines way behind the rest
It doesn't seem to be much better for the next gen of console this time around .
Yep its the only way to grow and get serious sales . You need to be multi platform and making games with an eye to the west really . America and Europe are really where the major sales are for consoles (non Hand held )
VF5, VT3 etc were made in house, in Japan. Lindbergh was next gen. Most of Sega's biggest titles are arcade games. That'd be like saying Square wasn't ready for next gen; they just got lucky they happened to have a next gen Final Fantasy lying around.
It seems to me that just about every team was working on next gen projects in 04, 05 and 06. AfterBurner, House of the Dead, Monkey Ball, VF, VT, Fifth Phantom Saga, Psi Phi, Sonic 06 and so on. Some were canned, some were great, some were dismal. But they weren't just sitting around with their thumbs up their arses.