Goatseye said:
“Japanese customers favor domestic producers,” said Mr. Chang, executive director of the Center for Governance, Institutions and Organization at National University of Singapore. “No Korean or Western firms were good enough for them, except Apple. But you will find more Korean firms accepted in the Japanese mainstream in the future.” I think this guy knows Japanese market better tha you do. |
And that means racism? Also, yeah, he's wrong, as Apple certainly isn't the only popular over-seas product in Japan.
Really, how does that even work? Is Apple magically exempt from racism? No, they buy it because they like it, western or not. They go into McDonalds because they like it. They buy GTA, they watch American and Korean television because they like it.
Do a lot of older Japanese think that Japanese-made is the best? Yes, because they're stuck in the past. Many older Americans still think that American-made products are superior because that's how it used to be.
Like it or not, there are a lot of factors as to why Xbox did not succeed in Japan, including their own mistakes. People who worked with Microsoft then have said that. Yeah, they're partial to national brands but that's not all there is to it. You just can't blame it all on Japanese consumers and then call it a day. Go read about how Microsoft screwed up in trying to secure Resident Evil or Final Fantasy.
Many meetings and dinners later, a meeting in the US at E3 2003 was arranged. Microsoft and Square executives sat down to discuss Final Fantasy 11. From the off it was a disaster. “I had gone through a lot of work to set up this meeting,” Fries says. “I just sat there and watched it fall apart. There was a whole bunch of American attitude to the meeting, and the Japanese did not appreciate it.
“It was like watching a train wreck. It was like watching all this work I had done just fall apart.”
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Japanese gamers began complaining that the Xbox was scratching game discs. It wasn't a problem local to Japan, but there it caused an uproar that blind-sided Fries and the Xbox team back in Redmond. The re-sell market in Japan is particularly important, and if there is a scratch on a disc it lowers the value of the game. “It's not really an issue in the US,” Fries says. “Maybe western companies sell to a different standard than Japanese companies. As it spun in the carrier it could leave a rotary scratch on the outside of the disc, which doesn't interfere with gameplay at all, but interfered with the re-sell value in Japan.”
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-13-why-xbox-failed-in-japan
