I know Microsoft’s struggles in Japan have been discussed ad-nauseam and the cause/s have been widely speculated.  Whether it be nationalistic pride in supporting Japanese companies, a general concensus of poor reliability, an equally poor marketing campaign or even simpler a lack of interest in the games available.  Whatever the reasons may be I keep looking at the weekly sales figures with a furrowed brow as to why their efforts so far have faired so poorly.

My question is; if you were Robbie Bach what would you do to increase market adoption?

If I may inject my own opinion on the matter I don’t think they’re going to see drastic changes until they make more developer acquisitions/buy well known exclusives.  The contract with newly formed Mistwalker has helped, but without a pre-established history of popular franchises, it’s not enough to make the general consumer take the leap of faith. 

Buy Square. That would guarantee a much larger commitment to Microsoft consoles, both now and permanently. Though I think Sony would have an easier time of doing that than Microsoft, since the two companies have been in bed financially for a long time, i.e. the FF games, the bomb that was the FF movie that almost wrecked Square, etc.

I'm not exactly sure what they could do to entice people to buy the system in numbers that would be comparable to the competition.

The system is already cheaper there than anyplace else in the World so it's doubtful a price drop would really help that much.

One thing they could do though is keep exclusives on the system rather than going for timed exclusives since most Japanese gamers seem willing to wait for the PS3 version of the game.

Doubling the 360's library like Microsoft said it's going to do might help some.

Hmm… Well an idea I’ve been thinking of is that they should release a slimmed down version for Japan. This way they could be more in keeping with Japanese aesthetic appeal as it seems to be too big and loud for what Japanese consumers are used to. Now I’m not sure about the details but now that the console has been out awhile this should be possible. As for how cost effective it is…well, if they’re dead-set on trying to break into the Japanese market they might as well try it at this point.

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. ._.

@Akuma: They tried around th emiddle of original 'Box'es life. Square wouldn't have it. Not to mention Sony owns a 10% stake in Square which they bought after the disaster that was the first FF flick.

One studio that I could easily see them lapping up would be Koei. As terrible as the games are, Dynasty/Samurai Warriors Extreme/Legends/Empires sell by the truckload in Japan, and I believe it would allow MS to gain some footing there (they would never catch PS3 thanks to the large disparity between them, but they could start selling some respectable numbers.)

Also, I strongly believe they should rebrand it in Japan, since X means 'no' there, or something like that.

If MS could get a foothold in Japan, even if Sony outsold them by 10,000 a week, Sony would have no chance.

they need a much better games line-up with games that appeal to japanese tastes, a price cut may help while they need to step it up a bit in marketing. i think a slimmed down version would go down well.

@Slacker

I agree with the Japanese third party software developer support comment. It is somewhat of a catch 22; as in they need their support to sell more consoles and they’ll only get it if they sell more consoles. Figure that one out.

@Sink

“since X means 'no' there, or something like that.”

haha that is funny, and apparently the tagline ‘Jump In’ doesn’t make any sense either. What are those marketing guys thinking, they seriously need to re-think their strategy.

buy japanese company..
small company ..with M$ money it will become big

With the money MS has they should buy Capcom, Konami AND Square.
They should also buy Take Two to cement their US advantage.