"although 800k of the s/w sales have come from Japan, that's not too bad considering the 400k h/w insall base (ie, 2:1 software attach rate for 1m sellers)"
Sure it's not bad, and that's why I said obviously they shouldn't abandon Japan altogether. But if Microsoft does not have an infinite amount of money to spend, they would get a better return on their money if they focused elsewhere instead of Japan. If there are games that sell well in both Japan and the rest of the world, that would be ideal, but spending lots of money on games that will sell "not bad considering the [tiny] install base" in Japan while bombing elsewhere seems like it would be a bad business decision at this stage.
"Halo Wars - 1,000,000 seller"
Halo Wars not selling 2 million would be disappointing, considering it has "Halo" in the name.
"Add DOA4 onto the list, as far as we can tell."
DOA4? Vgchartz has it at 430k for US and Japan.
http://vgchartz.com/games/game.php?id=479
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
