| NJ5 said: @DMeisterJ: OK, I clearly hadn't been paying much attention to Japanese sales (probably because I was on vacation :P). Since it's been going on for some weeks, it seems the boost is real. Impressive, relatively speaking of course. |
Having followed the X360 sales in Japan (litterally) every week since early 2006....
What the Xbox 360 has been doing the past few weeks is nothing short of a legitimate, real, trend in sales. The Xbox 360, this year, has been nothing short of bad for the system - It has been nowhere near the sales of 2007, and any game releases have given the console minimal increases in sales. This led me to believe that the Xbox 360 had reached some sort of saturation in Japan, in which we should expect very mild sales from now on.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pTLj2bA3Ha6v8H7pvGVxdPg
However, the Xbox 360, for the past 2 months, has been totally different than any other month that the Xbox has ever had in Japan (look at the green 2008 line in the weekly chart). It's been slowly increasing, until Gundam: Operation Troy launched, and boosted the X360 to 5,000 units a week. Rather than just drop down to expected levels (50% of the boost), it's actually stayed within 25% of that bump. This is VERY impressive given the Xbox 360's pitiful history in Japan.
Although we can possibly think that the recent uptick in sales is due to Tales of Vesperia launching oh-so shortly, one merely has to look at 2007, and when Eternal Sonata, Lost Odyssey, Halo 3, or Ace Combat 6 launched - All saw very minimal increases before the game launched. This is different, because the Xbox 360 is up 200-250% from just under 2 months ago - again, with very little games that are big.
To me, this would mean that Japanese games are precieving the Xbox 360 more favorably - mostly due to the new announcements of JRPGs, and the transition the market is making to more and more multi-platform games. The Japanese fanbase isn't very loyal (see how owners went from the PS2 to Wii, and from the SNES to PSX), and it would seem that in a very small way, they "have got the message" about where games are going to be at - the Xbox 360 - and are starting to buy the console in much larger numbers than normal.
Now, having said all of this, this is not to justify how poorly the Xbox 360 is doing. It's doing bad, and even at 5,000/wk, it's still not good. However, if this trend persists, and Microsoft can launch more and more games, the Xbox 360 will have gone from having the worst console launch since the Sega Genesis, to being in a position to do 3 or even 4 times the unit sales of the Xbox. And getting the Xbox's failure out of Japanese gamer's minds (I would assume), isn't very easy. But it seems they are making the switch. For similar comparison: the Xbox was selling around 500-1,000 units per week if you align dates. So the X360 is certainly doing tons better.
What remains to be seen, is what happens after ToV - Will sales stay high due to Clannad and Infinite Undiscovery coming out soon? If the Xbox 360, after ToV, can manage 5,000+ units per week until the end of the year, I think the X360 will of done something just short of a PSP-style miracle in the marketplace.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
