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Japan Will Have To Wait For Xbox
securitas contributed a link to this New York Times article which indicates a delay in the Japanese release of the Xbox. "MS insists it's going to meet its Nov. 8 North American release date. I'll believe it when I see it. Also, Namco has signed on to produce 4 games for Xbox including 2 exclusives." Ledge adds a link to this AP story carried by Fox News as well: upshot is that units won't go on sale in Japan till Feb. 22. (A chart comparing announced vs. actual dates for all the consoles would be interesting, since they all seem to be delayed.)
Japan always seems to go its own way on a lot of techie things. Given the dominance of homegrown consoles in that market, is it likely that MSFT will take it over?
What about localisation issues for XBox, availability of games. local titles?
Some of the big games in the arcades here (China) are dancing games, drumming games, piano playing games (!), all very far away from traditional console fare. I've seen accessories for these for various consoles. Question, are MSFT going to push games which do well in their home market weirdness and ignore local weirdness?
dave "no mr. bond, i expect you to dance!"
That's what you get for making us wait forever for all your game systems!
And for not releasing any RPG's during the NES era!
And for dumbing down what RPG's you did release!
And for not releasing the Linux kit for the PS/2 here!
And for giving us all that tentacle pr0n! *shudder*
And most of all... that's for the fan abuse at the end of Evangelion!
So there!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's already too late for the XBox. More delays in the Japan release will just mean fewer titles developed in Japan. The machine will flop in Japan, and if it flops in Japan, it will be a worldwide flop.
Now the REAL question is, since Bungie was bought out by M$, are they going to keep their promise and do a simultaneous Mac/PC/XBox release, or will M$ shaft everyone and force them to do an initial release on XBox only?
That reminds me of something Bill Gates once said about Windows in it's infantcy. He was trying to get developers to write Windows applications, when everyone was still developing DOS applications. He had the vision of a highly integrated Windowed environment with applications that had a consistent user interface. He was far from the first to have this vision, but he felt that it had reached it's time. The x86 platform could finally supply the processing power, and the future was multithreaded/windowed environment. The problem was third party developersdidn't want to develop for it beacuse there was a much larger user base for DOS applications than Windows. So he forced his developers at Microsoft to develop Windows applications because MS developers didn't have a choice, they had to do what he wanted. The result was MS Office, which is undeniably MS's cash cow. That time Bill was right.
Now we have the XBox. Microsoft wants developers to develop for it, but they're not sure. There's a lot of PS2s out there, Gamecube is comming, and what does MS know about the console market? What does microsoft do? They buy some gaming companies to make sure there are some games for the XBox.
Bill has been wrong before, and MS has taken huge losses on projects in the pase (BOB comes to mind). But they're not afraid to try. And you never know, Bill might be right again.