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360 To Be Relaunched In Japan
GamesIndustry.biz reports that Microsoft is planning to relaunch their next-gen console in Japan ... now that there are some games to offer players. The event is scheduled to happen in June, to coincide with that country's launch of Ghost Recon, among other titles. From the article: "It's not yet clear what form the relaunch might take - whether it will see the console's pricing or bundles being changed, or if it will simply be a new marketing campaign focused on the locally relevant software available for the system. Japan was the only territory where the Xbox 360 did not sell out at launch, despite having a smaller allocation than any other market, and in fact the launch underperformed by comparison with the launch of the original Xbox - itself hardly a stellar success story in the region."
"Never time to do it right. Always time to do it twice." Saw this a lot as a consultant. Never rings truer!
Japan doesn't need or want a FPS game like Ghost Recon. What they want is Brain Training and Nintendogs. They want Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. They want Zelda and Mario.
If the second launch doesn't include any new genres, then I expect it to succeed as much as the first one. That is to say, not at all.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
What is this "relaunch"? A console can only launch once.
Are they going to bundle a game with it? Nintendo's done that with the Gamecube like 4 times and they weren't called "relaunches". Are they going to ship more consoles? No... that's not neccessary. Are they going to market it agressively? That's still not a "relaunch", that's a "marketing campaign".
Maybe it's just a different interpretation of the word "launch". To me it means "the first time you sell your product to the public". Maybe to them the meaning is "the first time the public buys your product".
Sure, I'm looking too much into this, but a term like "re-launch" peeves me. It's like how the little things got to the Seinfeld gang.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
It's not about the number of games, and it's not even so much about the quality - it's what those games are. Microsoft completely failed to grab the Japanese audience with the original XBox and they swore up and down that they learned from their mistakes and wouldn't repeat them with the 360 in Japan. Lo and behold, they did repeat them.
From our perspective, the Japanese play some weird-ass games like Shogi, Go, Horse Race Gambling, Mahjongg, and somtimes weird combinations of the 4. Microsoft doesn't seem to get this. The Japanese are fully aware that they don't get this and they find it offensive that this upstart American company expects them to buy a product that they clearly didn't bother to research enough to cater to them.