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20 Reasons Why The 360 Might Fail in Japan
1up.com has an interesting look at the forces ranged against Microsoft in Japan, as the 360 poises for a major push in foreign markets. From the article: "There are enough reasons (we have ten) to believe things will be different next round, and Xbox 360 will eat away at PlayStation's dominance in Japan. Yet there are those who still believe Japan will never embrace a non-Japanese game console (and we've got ten reasons why these arm-chair analysts are correct.) Warm up your typing fingers as we give you ten reasons why Xbox 360 could kick ass in Japan, and ten reasons why it could bomba bomba in Kutaragi's backyard."
Wireless controllers suck. Why are they going to be mandatory on the new consoles? I look forward to interference and loads of batteries. Fuck!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Unless it actually has boobs, this isn't going to help. In the Japanese market, the main design flaw of the Xbox was its sheer size. It wasn't a masculine/feminine problem. Personally, I think it's still too big but being able to stand vertically helps.
Come on editors, let's get on the ball.
The article has 20 reasons why the Xbox might Fail in Japan or not. There are 10 reasons why it might succeed and 10 reasons why it might fail.
Can someone fix the headline?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
10 Reasons Why the 360 Might Fail in Japan
10 Reasons Why the 360 Might Succeed in Japan
that bashing the XBox 360 is the Slashdot meme du jour, but the article actually consists of 10 reasons why it might fail, and 10 reasons why it might succeed.
How do I know this? Did I read the article? Bah! It's in the damn summary:
Warm up your typing fingers as we give you ten reasons why Xbox 360 could kick ass in Japan, and ten reasons why it could bomba bomba in Kutaragi's backyard
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Many people believe one of the reasons the first Xbox failed in Japan is its relatively large size. If you've ever been to Japan, you know how little space there is. In this round, however, the Xbox 360 is actually slightly smaller than the PS3 model that Sony has shown. So it will be interesting to see what difference, if any, this makes.
Because some of the biggest and best dev studios are japanese, and if a console is failing in their home country (many times their primary market), they arent going to develop for it.
A nice little read. But this just tells us what we already knew, it's gonna be a do fight baaaaaaabyyyyy! And that can only means good things for gamers. Even the Dreamcast had some nice games in its ultimately losing effort. So I think we're gonna see some really interesting stuff coming out of Japan on Xbox 360. Some have said here and elsewhere that the Japanese will never embrace a foreign console, but I don't think it's that simple. The impression I have is that the Japanese like new things that are cool whether they come from Japan or not. That's why Nintendo and Sony, for example, would even bother with so many variations on their consoles (special editions, etc.) that come out in Japan but generally do not make it to the U.S.. And that's why there are a million and one cell phone models in Japan, and so on. In Japan, companies have to keep things fresh and new to stay in the game. If the Xbox 360 can deliver fresh, new Japanese games that people will want to play, then they have a shot. They may not take down Sony and Nintendo, but a really strong showing would be as good as a win in the land of the rising Sun.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I think it's funny that Microsoft is pushing to be the first to market with the next-gen system. For most generations, the first to market ends up being forgotten completely (for more information see Wikipedia:
The first of the current generation of video game systems was the Dreamcast.
The first of the generation before that (64 bit) was the Jaguar.
The first 8 bit system? Colecovision, which had the distinction of doing pretty good for an extremely short period of time untill the NES was released.
Actually, it looks to be almost a fluke that the Genesis did fairly well, considering that it was the first major player in the 32 bit market. And the Atari 2600 is probably too old to really compare, as the market has shifted vastly since then. So MS naysayers should be happy that MS is pushing for such an early release.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
American games feel like they were designed by marketers, not artists, because they are.
It does say they have "all" Japanese publishers on board this time...Maybe it'll be different then, I hope so.
PLEASE NOTE: The preceding was a generalization, there are some good american games. But clearly not enough that appealed to the Japanese market, or me.
--Proud Dreamcast owner, still has some of the best games ever.
And also, illiterate.
Most Japanese I speak with have told me the number one reason they won't buy American.
The games are too unforgiving.
What they mean to say is that they are generally "unfair". Most FPSs fall under this category. Let's say that the typical Japanese player is playing an FPS and suddenly a sniper from out of nowhere on the opposite team gets a head shot on him. What does the Japanese person do? He switches the game off.
He doesn't get frustrated. He doesn't whine about how unfair it is and start namecalling over chat. He doesn't get angry and try harder. He just says "this is too hard, and unfair, therefore this isn't fun" and switches off.
Japanese want to play games that are (a) fair and (b) fun. They do not derive sick pleasure from being killed from out of nowhere with no chance to respond in a logically thought out way.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You really need to spend some time in Japan. The size thing *IS* a real issue.
Its not a matter of stereotypes, its a matter of reality.
1. With the original Xbox, who the heck wants to carry that thing from a store to their home ? Hint: most people won't throw it in the trunk. They have to hand-walk it out the store, down the street, into the subway, through x number of connecting subway and train lines, back up the street, and up the stairs into their apartment.
2. Most people *really* don't have room for something as large as an Xbox. Yeah sure, they have room for a TV, but thats one concession people have to make. Think they will make another concession for an xbox when they can just get a PS2 and keep what little space is left ?
3. The xbox is noisy as hell. Well the original PS2 was noisy too but they quieted it down. In a small space, noise matters.
Overall, size counts because as someone else said, people buy tons of devices and they are extremely frugal on space and cost.
http://mo5.com/MHI/Firmes/Sega/megadrive.jpg
I won't contest what you've said about games made in the USA, because at least a _some_ of them do fit that bill. (But then again, not all.)
But you've also got to realize that the game-producing world doesn't consist only of USA and Japan. Ever heard for example of Bioware? You know, of KOTOR and Jade Empire fame? They're Canadian actually. Lionhead Studios, makers of Fable? They're in the UK. Etc.
So the XBox has plenty of games which aren't made in the USA. (And the PC even more of them.)
The USA actually produces relatively few games. It's not just that the EU produces more games than the USA. The UK alone makes more games and sells more copies than the USA.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It matters to those of us trying to decide which next-gen console to buy who don't like American taste oriented FPS/Sports titles. If the 360 fails in Japan (as the XBox did) we won't see many games that appeal to us. This happened for me with the XBox - great console, but I only have 5 games for it, compared to 20+ each for both PS2 and Gamecube.
Of the 360 "launch period" titles the only two games that look like they appeal to me are either coming out eventually for the PC (ES IV) or from a dev that used to be golden but has been lackluster lately (Rare - and I am not talking about PD:0).
Now, for MS itself, I don't know that it really matters. Sure, they'd love to succeed in that market, but the US/EU market are big enough that they can survive on just those.
While Microsoft has signed on several big name developers to do games, none will have games ready for launch.
To expand on your point a little, here's the thing:
It doesn't matter what names you have signed up to make games for you. What matters is the games they actually end up making. This was true of the original Xbox too. The Xbox (and the Xbox 360) has a real reputation in Japan as an American system, for Americans. (They don't really even think about Europe; they just think about where the system is made and its largest market.) So the games they make, when they make them, are tailored more for American tastes. There may be nods here and there to the Japanese, but you just never see real Japanese niche titles, the largest RPG's, or the AAA new franchises debuting on Xbox there. So far, from the "in-development" lists I've seen for the 360, that's as true of the new console as it was of the original.
Development costs for the Xbox, according to the CESA, were more than twice that of the PS2. Given that, Japanese developers were less likely to develop games at all and when they did, they were obviously going to develop them for a market where they thought they'd sell. That wasn't Japan.
Now, MS is in a sort of chicken-or-egg quandary. Developers there don't really seem to have confidence that the 360 is going to sell, based on current Xbox sales and on various surveys (Famitsu's last survey showed only 2% of their readers were interested in the Xbox 360, despite MS's hype machine). So, whether or not MS has "every Japanese game developer" on board, what makes anyone think they're going to develop unique or even popular cross-platform games for the system? They might throw it a bone every once in a while, and of course you'll see DOA4 and Ridge Racer and other stuff that appeals to westerners as much as Japanese, but you will probably not see very much in the way of games that actually sell systems in Japan. Those will still go to the PS3, which is more or less guaranteed success in Japan.
I say it's a chicken-or-egg thing because developers have confidence in the PS3 because they know consumers want it, and consumers want it because they know it will have the most games they like. The reverse is true of the Xbox. The problem for MS is it takes more to change perception than just reversing one of those trends - i.e. they could sign up every developer under the sun, they could announce a slew of huge games just for the Japanese, but the perception consumers have of the system will not change overnight, and developers might again bail. The same would be true on the other end - even if consumers started warming up to the system through MS's marketing campaign, it will take a lot to convince developers that a real, major investment in the system will pay off (especially in comparison to making the same investment in the PS3). And if developers don't warm up to the system fast enough, any consumer enthusiasm will die off.
It is going to be a tough cycle for MS to break there. I'm not betting that they'll be able to do it - I don't give the Xbox 360 much of a chance there.
Given the choice between guilt-tripping about feeding the American Mega-Corp monster your heard-earned yen, and providing needed greenbacks to your local silicon-pimp zaibatsu, the average Japanese will, simply, buy Japanese.
Tell that to all the iPod-owning, Windows-using, Levi's-wearing, Mariah Carey-buying, Starbucks-drinking, Gucci-coveting, McDonald's-eating Japanese people that partake in western products every hour of every day.
I gathered the following stats from various sources via Google:
USA in 2003:
Population....................291 million people
Percentage playing games......50%
Hardware and software sales...$10 billion
Japan in 2003:
Population....................128 million people
Percentage playing games......37%
Hardware and software sales...$4.1 billion
The bottom line: The average Japanese gamer spent $86.50 on their hobby that year, while Americans only spent $68.70 the same year.
So yes, success in Japan DOES matter. While the Japanese game market has been shrinking since the year 2000, it is still worth more on a per capita basis. And when you have to weigh the cost of building a console at a per unit loss, you certainly want to attract the consumer that, on average, buys more software per console.
Must... think up... something... clever!
Do you have some stereotyped image of Japanese people squeezed into closets that are big enough for them and their PS2, but small enough that the extra cubic foot of an xbox would cause them to suffocate?
Spoken like someone who's never been to Japan, and never lived in a Japanese home.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."