How would it not be smart for Microsoft to release a handheld? It's extremely lucrative and its selling a portable at nearly 1/3 the launch price of HD consoles, with last gen graphics. Thats extremely affordable.

I see my earlier post went ignored...

Forget the western boycott for a second, and try to take a different angle. The Japanese are boycotting a console with far fewer games that appeal to the Japanese (compared to PS3), and has a bad reputation in its reliability (RRoD). Combine this with the PS brand / Bluray (whatever made PS3 catch up to 360 in Europe), and the sales make sense.

It takes much more than just a handful of smaller JRPG's to beat the franchises of Yakuza, MGS, Gran Turismo, Hot Shots Golf, and (let's not forget) Final Fantasy XIII / vXIII.

Meh, I think the reason why Japanese don't buy the american Xbox, it's because the system has too many FPS games, gory violent games. Some Japanese like those kind of games but I know Japanese love diffrent games RPGs, Adventures, Fantay worlds.. Ect...

I think this could be way oversimplified. Lets not forget that since the original Xbox inception it has been littered with a myriad of issues in Japan and I think it has more to do with the lingering stigma of ; poor marketing, unappealing games, all the big hitters exclusive to Playstation, a lack of confidence in a long life, an unattractive big black box, a controller too big etc. Add this generation’s problems of hardware failures and ‘FPS/Shooter box’…they really haven’t done themselves any favours in Japan.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though – in spite of all these issues and the anomaly to your argument is the 6 consecutive weeks that MS had over Sony. If you were to launch the 360 today – with the hardware revisions and a growing stereotype of ‘all the JRPGs are on Xbox’ – I think nationalistic pride would be scaled down on everyone’s priorities.

All of those things that you claim the Japanese love, the 360 has. The 360 has a great library with great variety. There is no excuse.

My post earlier shows how badly the PS3 trumps the 360 in exclusives. Even if the 360 has a great library, the PS3's is far superior (for the Japanese). It's a perfectly valid "excuse," which is why everyone buying into the "bias" seems to be ignorning my argument.

 Huh?

Stop nitpicking , its just a name.

 Why is the ps3 called "playstation" and why is nintendo wii called what it is?

And besides xbox 360 sounds infinitely more better than "xbox 2"

I haven't read through all the pages so apologies if someone else has made this point. Bigjons op shows a typical misinformed westerners viewpoint of Japan. Japanese people have no bias against western products in the slightest.

As a matter of fact often the best way to enter any industry in Japan is to be successful in the Uk or america, france etc go over there and let it be known you are successful there.

The reason MS are struggling in Japan is because the xbox isn't popular there. That sounds silly but basically Japan more than any country I have ever been to, being popular is important. If you can't get popular very quickly you are going to struggle to do it at all. If the first xbox had been released with a lineup similar to the 360 then it would probably have ended up making the xbox brand very popular there.

An interesting point I always find is the uk in a clothes shop the assitant will usually say to me ''Oh that really suits you'' or some other such compliment. In Japan they will almost always say ''That is our most popular item''.

People use apple as an example of western companies succeeding in Japan with the ipod. If apple had gone in and struggled with the ipod for 5 years then made a big push to make it popular it wouldn't have worked anywhere near as well.

The fact is it appears japan's hardcore gaming otaku have already bought the xbox. Thus why games there can have such a HUGE attach rate. The 'real' gamers as you call them do have a 360. However the hardcore market is very small (im assuming 90% of the hardcore market would fall within males between the age of 15-35). Just think of the demographics of japan and you realise how small it really is. If necessary I will get the population stats and show you.

The casual gaming crowd in Japan haven't picked up on the 360 because it isn't popular enough. The 360 may have picked up a lot of the core gaming titles. But those aren't the titles that sell a system to 10million+ people. If MS had gone in with the original xbox with enough games to sell it to the core gamers instantly, advertised it heavily and then played up on it selling out etc then they could have been far far more successful.

I also don't think MS securing games like LO, BD etc has meant that suddenly people won't buy another console.

Maybe last gen...not this gen.

Were you expecting to see a big O on top of the "x"box? You my friend have a very strange view of the way corporations using marketing. MS did not exploit any X-named phenomenon, I can't think of a more proper name MS could have used with respects to the the console using "DirectX" technology.