I suppose there’s that too. But even then, I think the same point about those products being made or localized to avoid associations with foreignness holds. I don’t think people were buying Nintendo and Sega games because they were japanophiles.

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it some more, I think while those games had a wider adoption than anime, they probably had less of an impact on Western perceptions of Japan than anime did. Anime eventually evolved past that initial localization trend and the people who stuck with it got introduced to more and more (anime filtered) Japanese culture over time. The Japanese game companies kind of just blended into the global games industry. While there are some games that are very distinctly Japanese, if you showed someone the average Nintendo game without any context, they wouldn’t know where it was from. We have anime weebs, but we don’t really get game weebs in the same way. I mean, there are some communities that are heavily nostalgic for older nintendo games, but I wouldn’t really describe that in the same terms as weebs. They’re more in love with older tech and design principles that happened to coincide with a time when Japanese studios were the dominant force in the market, but again, not in a very culturally apparent way.