SOURCE: vg247.com
WHAT DOES JAPAN REALLY THINKS OF XBOX ONE?
This is a pretty long post, so for all you tl;dr people, I've shortened it so it's more easy to read. You still have the long, extensive article up there ^ in the source.
Japanese gamers and the Xbox brand haven’t exactly been getting along too well in recent years. Every week we post Japan’s Media Create charts and see a notable absence of successful games on Microsoft’s format. Sometimes less than 250 Xbox 360 consoles are sold in a given week. From the outside looking in, the East seems like a lost cause.
Gamers and members of the press are all too eager to pronounce the Xbox format a failure in Japan. There’s a lot of guesswork and too many assumptions. Something is clearly broken in Microsoft’s attempts to penetrate the market, otherwise the Xbox One would have a solid Japanese release date by now. Every day this is looking less like a failure, but a company that simply doesn’t care. With such a stranglehold over the American market, does it even need Japan?
Mixed messages, half-baked ideas
“It’s fair to say that Xbox 360 players in Japan are generally either core gamers or people who obsess over particular game characters. The latter are people who bought an Xbox because of games like the Idol Master series or Steins;Gate. Most mainstream gamers see the Xbox 360 negatively as ‘an underground games system for core gamers’.
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Sak – once again – shared Nal’s point of view, “Promotion for the Xbox 360 in Japan is far inferior to other games consoles. Advertising in stores is usually for other games and there are almost no Xbox TV commercials. The Xbox 360 space is usually tucked deep inside stores. For better or for worse, Xbox has an underground feel to it, which is comfortable for core gamers, but off-putting for mainstream gamers.”
Are indies bothered about making games for Xbox?
As Nal suggested, the core userbase is actually starting to shift away from Xbox 360 and towards PlayStation 3. Such migration casts the future of Microsoft’s brand into further doubt across Japan, so it stands to reason that interest in developing for Xbox One could falter apace. There are some interesting high-profile games coming to Xbox One from Japan that seem to belie Microsoft’s silence on the country. Swery65′s D4 and Yukio Futatsugi’s Crimson Dragon spring to mind, while Xbox 360 shooters like Deathsmiles (above) are popular among gamers. But what of Japan’s bubbling indie scene?
“I used to work on Xbox 360 games in a game development studio,” Nal explained. “The Xbox 360 is a great piece of game hardware and very easy to develop for, but the language barrier was a significant obstacle and we really felt the distance between Japan and the US. Questions to Microsoft Japan are relayed to the Microsoft in the US and it can take a long time to get responses."
What does Japan really think of Xbox One?
“None of my gamer friends are talking about the Xbox One,” Sak replied. “It was covered in the media, but it was cursory coverage and it’s not as if it’s being promoted over other game consoles. I think there’s a strong chance that the Japanese Xbox One launch will fail. People expect multi-functionality from PCs, but it not from a gaming machine. This is also a problem for the PS4. The official sites for both consoles seem more like consumer electronics than games consoles. There is lots of flashy talk, but they don’t look much fun.
“In the end, I think that the success or failure of the Xbox One will depend upon whether it has any killer software to attract Japanese gamers. Japanese people will probably buy the PS4 over the Xbox One, not because of differences in functionality, but because the PS4 is more likely to release games targeted at Japanese people.”
“Ease of development is a strength of the Xbox 360, but I hear that the Xbox One is 64-bit, so I’m concerned that the PS4 will be at an advantage in terms of ease of development. I like the Xbox 360 and enjoying playing on it, but there’s no escaping that the present situation for the Xbox in Japan is tough.”
Is Xbox One a lost cause in Japan?
