So according to recent articles and obvious observance, Kinect is not selling like MS execs thought it would in Japan. Most of the Xbox 360 owners in Japan are part of the "hardcore" crowd that buy more games than the casual gamer.  MS has struggled to get any significant sales of their Xbox 360 in Japan. They obviously thought Kinect would boost sales in the region. In reality it has really had almost no effect.

Source article: http://www.slashgear.com/kinect-sales-miss-japanese-targets-16180375/

What are your thoughts on this? Obviously Kinect and Xbox 360 software is not currently attractive to Japanese gamers. There is no sign that MS will pull its resources out of Japan even if it would save them money. They seem to be insisting to stay in that region and try to push the brand.

1. Do you think MS should consider pulling out of Japan?

2. Why in your opinion is Kinect not currently attractive to Japanese gamers?

3. Will the release of windows 8 boost Xbox 360 sales like the article suggests it might?

bring some galgame to support Kinect like this one
http://www.cave.co.jp/gameonline/adventure/product.html

Yes it will popular....

Probably not.

It's actually done well there and with one more little push it could push past 200k, but yeah, it's never going to take off there really.

I guess one of the reasons could be Kinect's space requirements. If I remember correctly, many japanese were concerned that they might simply not have enough space for Kinect because of rather small japanese rooms and flats. And that was before Kinect was even released - when Kinect was finally released, the space requirements indeed quickly turned out to be the most discussed problem, even in countries where people didn't expect this to be much of a problem.

And apart from that, Kinect doesn't actually do THAT much worse in Japan than it does in EMEAA for example. In Japan, the Kinect/Xbox ratio is about 11.5%, in EMEAA it is about 14.5%. If it's true that Japan has a higher percentage of core gamers, then that alone might be the reason for the 3% difference.

I wonder if a large part of this is name recognition. I assume they hold Sony and Nintendo at a higher pedestal mostly because they are home brands and they are more familiar with them. It seemed MS expected Kinect to really catch wind in Japan, but it hasn't panned out. There is always the excuses that many Japanese homes/apartments are not designed for kinect play due to small sizes. I'm not sure thats entirely the case and rather more so lack of brand name recognition and unatracttive software titles.

Well with only 994 sales this week it's pretty much dead now. Don't see any Japanese game that can chance it.

seriously there's chance

1.fire Takashi Sensui

2.bring back Yoshihiro Maruyama<-this guy was Square COO before he joined MS at 2002,and he made Lost Odyssey,Blue Dragon,Infinite Undiscovery and N3,but sadly he got fired before Blue Dragon release

insteresting. I wasn't familiar with that. What was the reason of his firing?