If you were Robbie Bach...Xbox Japan Issue

[slacker164]

I think the strategy of buying exclusives has proven to be ineffective. When people buy consoles they expect software to keep coming over the years. When everyone one knows a game like Blue Dragon is simply paid for, it doesn't give people any feeling that 'more games like this will come.' Thus, people don't take the system seriously when it comes to Japanese software since there's so little genuine, unpaid support for it from Japanese developers.

And while there are a lot of factors as to why the 360 does poorly in Japan, software is far and away the number 1 reason. When you look at million sellers on the 360, the list is almost universally games that are guaranteed to have mediocre to piss poor sales in Japan. So what they need to do is get Japanese developers on board. Buying a studio or two wouldn't hurt, but they really need third party Japanese developers to put out good games in reasonable quantity on the system. How you make this happen is another matter though, and a near impossible task.

Also, before people start calling Japanese developers bigots and xenophobes, take a moment to think about how MS managed to get third party support from western developers. Many of the big games on the 360 are made by studios that were once PC/Windows only (heck the whole FPS genre was pretty much PC only). That means that MS had pre-existing relationships with a large number of western developers well before the original Xbox was ever released. By making the original Xbox almost identical architecturally to a PC, it was an easy task to talk developers into at least porting their PC titles to the system if not making them exclusive or timed exclusives. We still see this now with a large number of 360 games being released on PC.

In Japan the situation is radically different. PC gaming in Japan has been mostly dating sims, fan made titles, and stuff from smaller studios. Part of the reason PC gaming developed so differently in Japan was Microsoft's lack of presence in the gaming industry there. In other words, they had little to no existing relationships with Japanese developers despite games being available on the Windows/PC platform. For a foreign company to build those relationships from scratch is a monumental task. It's even hard for a domestic company if they don't have strong enough relationships with developers. Other systems like the Wonderswan also struggled to get games and catch on.

MS was in a very unique position to attract western developers in the US, and to some extent Europe, which allowed them to crack the western market in a very tough industry. Just imagine if say Ford Motors tried to launch a console. It would most likely bomb even in the US since they simply don't have any pull in the industry to get games on the system. This is the situation MS is up against in Japan. Realistically, I think they've actually done quite well for what they started with. It's a very slow process (that has been somewhat hindered by missteps in marketing, design, reliability, etc.), but they are building a presence and will likely continue to gain support as long as they don't give up. I think it'll be at least another generation before they have a chance at actually being popular though, and God only knows what things will be like then.


P.S. My apologies for the long post... it just sort of ended up that way. ._.