| mrstickball said: Lord N, If this is the way you feel, then what would you do if you were the marketing director of Microsoft in Japan, to boost Xbox 360 sales in the region? I'd really like to know what you'd do as the head of MS Japan to give it any measure of success. Give us a plan that Microsoft *should* have done, given their abilities, to help themselves out in the Japanese marketplace, rather than get 3rd party games.
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For starters, they could have looked at how other non-Japanese companies have managed to break into the Japanese market. Apple and the Ipod would have been a good place to begin. They should have tried to implement something new that Sony and Nintendo didn't have.
Then again, that's actually above MS because they aren't a very innovative company to begin with. They're used to being able to throw money around and get what they want, but now that MS's only real weapon has proven to be nigh useless, they really don't know what to do with themselves, because for the money they've spent, the most they can hope for is to end up a distant, unprofitable second and just a few million units ahead of the PS3 at best.
All that their money has really bought them is a few new IP's, and some of them have been unmitigated failures as far as sales and notoriety are concerned. Nintendo's first-party wipes the floor with anything MS could ever buy, and the proven third-party IP's that do well in Japan such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear Solid, Kingdom Hearts, Monster Hunter, etc, have remained on other platforms.
Certainly someone at MS could have devised a better strategy than burning hundreds of millions of dollars to reach meaningless sales marks. It reminds me of a military commander who starts a battle in which 100,00 of his troops die just to gain a few square miles of useless territory.
Consoles owned: Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, PSP, DS, PS3
