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What are your thoughts on videogames made exclusively for countries like China, Japan, South Korea, etc.? There are many of them but right now a few come to mind:

Halo Online – Was supposed to release exclusively in Russia but got cancelled and was later scrapped into the fan-game ElDewrito.

Fallout Shelter Online – A sequel to the mobile game Fallout Shelter developed by a chinese studio and intially released for China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and later made available in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and Japan.

A Counter Strike game – Only thing i remember about this one is anime girls, probably for South Korea

I tested Halo Online briefly for a gig. It was a pretty stable adaptation of the multiplayer, at least I think I hadn't played much Halo at all. Hard to play a game in cyrillic when you don't know how to read it.

Overall I don't mind it. With VPNs and the internet it is becoming increasingly easy to get into a game even if you're not in a country it is sold in. Localization costs and the differing cultural sensitivities of other nations can make some games much more costly.

The one thing I don't get is when a game will have an almost full localization but never actually release in the target country. Looking at you Bandai Namco. I had to import Girls Und Panzer TWICE it's freaking expensive and it's fully in English WHY.

Reminds me of DoA Xtreme 3. Game had full English localization but only came out in Asia. I believe Koei-Tecmo admitted it was due to concerns the game would cause way too much controversy in the West, but still they bothered to translate it into English anyway so it felt odd it never came our way. Hell the devs of HuniePop even said they'd legit pay KT a million dollars for the NA distribution rights. At least the consoles it came out on are region free (and on Switch it's uncut).

Also not sure why the Switch physical releases of certain classic Final Fantasy games are exclusive to Asia as well despite having multiple language options, including English. FF7, 8, and 9 are all available physically on Switch carts in Asia (FF7 and 8 is even a double pack), but not NA or PAL regions. Again hey at least the Switch is region free. (and an odd one, while FFX/X-2 Remastered did get a cart release in NA, Square's NA branch decided to only include FFX's data on the cart and FFX-2's data has to be downloaded to play it, but in Asia they did a special cart release where both games data are included on the cart so clearly their Asian distributor was willing to pay the extra cash for higher capacity Switch carts, but Square USA opted for the cheaper carts with less memory)

Looks like I've got something new to add onto the post I made above. Looks like the physical version of the Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is exclusive to Asia despite having full English language support

Now I'm wondering if this is just a thing Koei-Tecmo is doing now for their non-Warriors releases.

Do any Western companies do this as well?

Like, is there any game where they had full Japanese, Chinese or Icelandic (no judge pls) localisation done, and then just not bother to release it?

With the west the number one reason that games don't sell overseas is due to getting banned for excessive violence. Germany is the most strict against that but a lot of other triple-A western shooters have been banned in a lot of nations. There is one weird case I saw where Bethesda chose not to release Fallout 3 in India due to the game containing 2-headed cows called "Brahmin", for fear of cultural sensitivities there.