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Xbox Japan Boss Explains New Price Cuts

Posted by simoniker on from the it's-like-this dept.

Thanks to 1UP for their article covering Japanese Xbox boss Yoshihiro Maruyama's comments regarding yesterday's significant Xbox price drop in Japan. Maruyama explained that the price cut wasn't a reaction to Sony's Japanese PS2 price drop: "This discount was in the works for the end-of-year shopping season before SCE's announcement. The timing was on our own terms, and we aren't simply following the leader here." He also tried to explain why the Japanese videogame market is shrinking, suggesting: "You see companies in the U.S. using a multiplatform strategy, developing games for several consoles at once, with Electronic Arts leading the way. However, Japan concentrates all its development on the top platform alone, so it's easy to run into dead ends."

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not really... by HalfFlat · · Score: 2, Informative

    I can't believe games like Ikaruga or Soul Calibur II are ported to the GC... (And the fact that SCII on GC outsold the other versions shows that play control simply isn't that important to many gamers.)
    A percentage of people who take SCII seriously, play it with a joystick. In this circumstance, the default GC controller isn't important.

    Don't know how large this percentage is, but it's certainly large enough to make it economically feasible for Hori to make a GC-specific SCII arcade stick.

    For people who have access to both a PS2 and a GC, and who take fighting games seriously enough to use a stick, the only reason to buy the PS2 version over the GC version would be in the situation that they already have an arcade stick for the PS2 and don't want to buy a second for the GC. In every other respect (ignoring console specific characters, blech) the GC port is superior: better graphics, and, most importantly, free of the slowdowns that plague the PS2 version in some stages.

  2. Re:Price Cuts by drewmca · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you haven't tried them, Sega's sports titles are defintely worth a go. the football game is probably the best I've ever played. Sure, you can't change the price of hotdogs like you can in Madden. But the gameplay is dead on, the presentation is fantastic with its espn trappings, and the online play is nice. It's on both xbox and ps2 and probably worth at least a rent.