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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."

1 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not really... by Babbster · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I think you missed the crux of his point, which is that non-Japanese developers/publishers tend to put out each game on multiple platforms. This means that Splinter Cell, for example, saw sales on all three platforms because anyone with a game console could buy it. On the other hand, Super Monkey Ball hasn't sold even one copy to non-GC owners (ignoring portable releases) despite the fact that it could probably make a nice chunk of change with a PS2 port.

    Of course, while this perception is indeed factually correct, the motive for pointing it out is obvious. More than the other three consoles, Xbox has the most to gain from multiplatform releases since, besides the political issue of online capability (see EA and others), multiplatform releases can look and play better on the Xbox due to its superior hardware. Sony doesn't benefit as much since they already get the lion's share of releases and Nintendo gains little because most GC owners bought the console in order to play Nintendo first-party games.

    It's chicken and egg. Developers are reluctant to publish games for the Japanese Xbox market because there are so few Xbox owners. There are few Xbox owners because there aren't enough compelling Xbox games for the Japanese market. The best Microsoft can hope for now is that they get enough Japanese gamers to provide decent word of mouth when they release their next console. I suspect this is the reason they've decided to send over a lot of non-regionalized titles. They're hoping that enough English-speaking gamers in Japan will be interested in a few of these games to get a better spark for the next round. It'll be fun to see how it turns out.