I'm a Japanese PC fanatic (that is, I'm fanatical about the history of Japanese PCs and the games contained on them), and I can tell you the amount of adventure games is much larger than you think.
Speaking of which, has anyone here heard of Touch Detective?
It's a DS Point and Click adventure game for the DS. It's quite good, and it's from Japan. Also the third game in the series wasn't even translated.
Different cultures like different types of gameplay. Europe clearly prefers puzzle solving, America clearly prefers violence, and Japan clearly prefers in-depth stories. It's as simple as that really.
I think you are overlooking the fact that multiple big game studios like Dice and Machinegames, famous for the Battlefield and Wolfenstein franchises respectively, are situated in Sweden, as is Paradox, a studio which has released multiple war strategy games.
As for in-depth stories, I think that depends a lot more on the genre than origin country, seeing as while JRPG's do have complex stories, so do western RPGs, and a lot of popular japanese games, such as Mario Cart, Splatoon and Wii sports barely has a story at all.
Anyway, I've gotten the impression that the point and click Adventure genre is biggest in Germany, with most non AGS commercial games coming from german studios.
It was supposed to be a sweeping statement with plenty of exceptions. What I said was supposed to be the equivalent of saying women are more emotional than men. Of course it's not true for everyone. I was trying to say it's true on average. Of course that doesn't mean I'm right, and there's plenty on this thread to refute what I said.
Meanwhile in Europe they were "stuck" inbetween, with either office equipment (small computers) or moderately/outdated consoles. In Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe, they kept using the Amstrad and Amiga waaayyyy longer.
I don't know exactly why this was for most of Europe. But I definitely know why it was the case here in Britain. A bit like how LimpingFish knows a lot about the Japanese PC market, I know quite a bit about the British PC market. But... I get the feeling my knowledge on British PCs pales in comparison to what LimpingFish knows about Japanese PCs.
To summarise why Britain stuck with computers, it's all because it was cheaper and easier. You could pay £5 for a PC game (usually less), or £40 for a console game (usually more). And not only that but if you chose PC, you would also have access to pirated games (which were easy to get ahold of), so it was more like £5 for ten games. Those compilations of pirated PC games didn't stop until the late nineties as well, when torrents killed them off. And then of course you could just share your games with your friends if you bought some floppies (or tapes, depending on whether we're talking about the Amiga or the Spectrum).
And considering everything else you could do on a PC such as office work, and the fact that the NES had two incompatible versions released in the UK, it was no surprise that the PC won out. This didn't change until roughly around the time the PS1 released.
No doubt the PC market was responsible for the popularity of certain genres. But to my knowledge, platformers were the most popular genre in the UK. My dad didn't even have an adventure game on the Amiga. And he had a LOT of Amiga games. Unless you count Dizzy that is, but that was more like a platformer adventure game.
I didn't get to play a proper adventure game until I got onto a Windows 95 computer.
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