Xbox will NEVER be a hit in Japan. Never has, never will be. Japan has clearly made it clear that they do not care for the Xbox brand. Sony is struggling to maintain decent sales and that's their homeland, what sort of shot does Microsoft have?

Agreed. Microsoft seem to be making some moves to tackle this issue like putting all almost all of the Final Fantasy games on Game Pass and heavily marketing games like Kingdom Hearts 3 at E3 but let's face it they will never have the brand recognition in Japan that they desire. 

On one hand it looks like Microsoft will be far stronger in the next gen with Scarlett, Game Pass, X Cloud and more games ready for the launch window but then I hear behind the scenes that many devs are still waiting for their Scarlett dev kits to arrive and I take nothing for granted......

Anecdotal, but according to my family and friends.. PS4 is the way to go on consoles and most of them are non gamers (I like in the UK).

A few of the them have a Switch, PS4 and or PC for gaming.

Microsoft burned way too many bridges after the RROD and Kinect/DRM shenanigans. Its a brand thing for sure.

And an IP issue on top of that in Japan. Xbox simply doesn't have many games that Japanese players want to play. Unless Microsoft wants to make Minecraft an Xbox exclusive, they'll need to get a lot of Japanese games onto their console, and many of them exclusive to their console.

That didn't work last time they tried it on the 360. Almost every Japanese developer that got in bed with Microsoft for exclusivity ended up regretting it badly. US sales didn't make up for lost Japanese sales. Namco used the money Microsoft paid them for 360 games like Eternal Sonata and Tales of Vesperia to make better versions for PS3 to try and make up what they lost in sales by being 360 exclusive.  Vesperia did so poorly on 360 that the Tales studio got shut down.

Microsoft honestly needs to face the facts about the Xbox in Japan. It's never going to happen. They need to content themselves with the handful of multinational-focused Japanese developers willing to port their popular-in-the-US games and focus on the Western market otherwise. Other than that, they need to leave Japanese games to Nintendo and Sony.

I see your point, but I actually meant games they develop themselves for the Japanese market, new IPs, not games where they just bought the exclusivity for from another publisher.

And I agree that it will be very hard for Xbox, but it could at least reach 360 levels again next gen that way. Not great or even good, but at least not as abysmal as the XBO is doing.

They've tried that too. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey didn't help much, and Blue Dragon had Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and Akira Toriyama. I don't think either Microsoft or Mistwalker liked how that partnership went. Those were original IPs for the 360. There was supposed to be a third game, Cry On, that ended up never going anywhere. A generation earlier, they tried to make a MMO for the original Xbox with Level-5, and that relationship ended with Akihiro Hino vowing that he would never work with Microsoft again.  They simply don't have a clue when it comes to Japan, and there's more to MS's failures there than can be dismissed by writing it off as Japanese nationalism.

Those are just 2 IP, and just one game for each IP. I would consider that a start, but certainly not nearly enough for an entire console generation. For an entire console generation, I would consider at least half a dozen IPs and about a dozen games for each and any of the 3 main markets (North America, Europe and Japan) the bare minimum a console should push to have success in all regions.

But without a serious improvement of their image in Japan, even that won't be able to do much. Which brings us back to their brand issue...

Microsoft is in the market primarily to bar control of Sony's living room as an entertainment center. Microsoft's games division has long been in deficit, just look at the numbers or financial juggling he did in the games division. Despite the big company it is outside of the gaming market, inside  is just a rich man with an almost infinite pile of money.

I believe that in the next console Microsoft will perform much better than this Generation.

Sales on it are slowing down, and I don't imagine there's a whole lot of people out there who do not yet have the system who still intend to purchase one... especially with the successor on the horizon.