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Games For the 360's Japanese Comeback
Next Generation has an article looking at games that could save the Xbox 360 in Japan. Despite Microsoft's best efforts, the console is still puttering along with lackluster sales. Even with the country's diminished interest in the PS3, the 360 needs some big-name titles to get it back into the minds of Japanese consumers. From the article: "Blue Dragon is set up to be another stick of dynamite with Toriyama's name written on it, though how willing casual fans will be to pick it up depends entirely on its advertising campaign. In America, it's becoming a simple enough strategy to put a demo of something on Xbox Live and let it spread through word of mouth. This is not so possible in Japan, mostly because most people here don't have an Xbox 360. Polls for months have indicated that the majority of casual gamers would reserve their judgment of the 360 for when they could play Sakaguchi's games."
It's gonna take more than a few crappy RPGs to save a failing console. The 360 pretty much has no market share in Japan, and that won't be changing any time soon.
Should read "Games for Zonk's Wishful Thinking about the 360's Japanese Comeback".
First off, you can't "come back" when you never "came" to begin with. The most the 360 can hope for in Japan is to rise to acceptability from abject failure.
Second off, remember 99 Nights? This was the first one of the "zomg for Japan!!" games the 360 got. It, too, was supposed to finally catch the attention of Japanese consumers and be the comeback point that kickstarted the 360's Japanese career. It bombed. Afterwards, the Americans who'd been talking about how excited Japan supposedly was for 99 Nights quietly dropped the subject. Now, Blue Dragon has better chances than 99 Nights ever did. But I still don't think its fate is going to be all that different from 99 Nights.
Third, you realize that although this Sakaguchi guy came up with the basic game design, and the music was done by a famous Square veteran, the actual game being made by Artoon? The people who made Blinx. Blinx. Blinx! If the mere involvement of Sakaguchi in one game is supposed to be enough to save the XBox 360 from the brink of extinction, then the involvement of Artoon in that same game should be enough to sink it again.
Microsoft's Japan strategy is more about America than it is about Japan. It's first off about providing some "Japanese-y" games for Microsoft's American customers to play, and second off about allowing pro-XBox 360 bloggers (like Zonk) to write endlessly about how the XBox 360 is going to do really well in Japan. It's absolutely clear and effortless to see that the XBox 360 is not doing really well in Japan, that the XBox 360 is doing even worse in Japan than the original XBox, but as long as the bloggers keep up the smokescreen it doesn't look that way if you're thousands of miles away in America and aren't actually paying attention...
Sony has been making PR blunders lately like Buster Keaton dropping his hat. -Racist Advertising Campaign (Whether or not it was intentional, people are screaming.) -Rootkit debacle (I'm STILL hearing news stories about this) -Introducing MORE new types of media in an extremely clogged market. The PSP sucks for the same reasons the PS3 will suck. Too pricy, too expensive to develop for, weird media no one wants to pay for or use. Maybe they will make the PS4 play a new type of memory stick. -Steadilky declining quality control since the 1990's. If MSoft just hangs in there (and they certainly can with their American and European business) Sony will hang itslef eventually.
I'm no healthnut, but I'm interested: www.healthbolt.net
This isn't a comeback ... making a comeback implies you made it the first time.
... a do-over? a second-debut? Still trying not to get market share?
This is, what
It doesn't sound like they'd be making a re-surgence or anything like that, since they never surged in the first place.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
....The Xbox and the Xbox 360 aren't Japanese consoles. Maybe its Japan's way of boycotting US consoles. If it doesn't say 'SONY' or 'Nintendo' on it, they aren't buying it.
Just a thought
We all know the problem with selling the XBox or 360 in japan, it's because us americans have such large... controllers.
They've just got controller envy.
I welcome our new chinpokomon overlords
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
Need I say more about what they all want. H-games & dating games are what's hot.
Don't forget the power of p0rn.
I think you're confusing Japan with the US.
that most of Japan doesn't like Microsoft's gaming products? Much in the way I don't like Diet Pepsi. Renaming it, repackaging it, telling me how great it is, isn't going to make me want to drink it because I already have an idea what it'll taste like.
Japan doesn't like Microsoft's taste.
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America are made by North American developers. Is there some kind of sick need for Japan to "approve" of the console to lend it credibility?
If MS can make a business out of making a western console for a western market, all the power to them. Maybe it's time to play hard-to-get and let the japanese pine for imports and translations of the western hits. Or not, doesn't really effect me any.
MS should concentrate on getting good games on the console for "any" territory, and stop worrying about the asian market. Blizzard seems to be doing well in China with almost no effort to adhere to some kind of asian sensibility, other than language translation. Good games are good games, regardless of territorial borders.
The 360 is doing so poorly in Japan that after seven months on the market the system still hasn't sold through its initial 150k shipment.
And with the abysmal and shrinking sales the 360 is doing each week it is unlikely the system will ever get through the remaining 360s gathering dust on Japanese store shelves right now.
One benefit of having the 360 failing so hard in Japan is it draws attention away from how hard the system is selling in the rest of the world. The latest confirmed by third party retail sales trackers puts the 360 at:
130k in Japan
1.6 million in the US
700k in Europe
That puts the 360 at just 2.5 million worldwide after seven months. That's worse than the Dreamcast and worse than the first Xbox. (Don't bother piping in with some 3-5 million ship number you heard from someone somewhere on the Net for the 360)
Microsoft needs a 100 dollar pricedrop now - not in November. Microsoft isn't even getting a decent percentage of current Xbox owners to go out and buy their console. For the 360 to even remain viable the system needs to start selling to that existing Xbox fanbase and reach at least Dreamcast installed base numbers.
There are dramatic and never seen before changes going on up in Redmond these days as anyone who follows Microsoft knows. The days of allowing projects to just burn through cash indefinitely are over.
It is fascinating how incredibly sensitive that XBox 360 fanatics are about their pet cause. I don't think there's a single post in this entire Slashdot discussion, no matter how dry or factual, which has managed to state the bad news about the XBox 360 in Japan without being attacked, harrassed to keep quiet, and accused of being a "fanboy" of something or other..
But hey, we all know about the well-known bias of facts.
Microsoft needs to sell it's Xbox division to a Japanese company. Said company will shrink the Xbox360 to human sizes, and THEN is might outsell the wonderswan ;)
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
I doubt that's really a relevant issue. Everyone claimed that size had something to do with the first Xbox's lackluster sales. Now Sony's going to be introducing a very large console too - the PS3 is larger than the 360. Somehow, I don't see that affecting things very much at all.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Are you aware that the PS3 is going to be bigger than even the original Xbox?
From the article:
PlayStation 3 - 8726.9 cm^3
Xbox - 7727.4 cm^3
Xbox 360 - 6616.9 cm^3
PlayStation 2 - 4179.1 cm^3
Gamecube - 2656.5 cm^3
Mac mini - 1384.7 cm^3
PStwo - 978.9 cm^3
Wii - 955.5 cm^3
You guys BOTH missed the first (more important point) ... sell it to a Japanese company :) The size thing was more a joke, and yes, I'm fully aware of how big the PS3 is projected to be (remember .. nothing is final yet .. it's final when they start churning them off the assembly line).
:)
What the Japanese don't like is an American console.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Remove the microsoft logo and put on a Japanese companies name, no hardware or software lineup changes needed. I guarantee sales would quadruple overnight.
This is the same guy who takes 8 paragraphs to say that he likes or dislikes any given game on his own site. Along the way, readers are presented with stream-of-babbble details about what he ate for lunch and how he felt about yet another stranger treating him differently from what he was expecting. And every experience he talks about just makes more of an arrogant prick out of him, leading to his delusions that he is much cooler than any human being possibly could be. His obscurity-packed writing style gave birth to what is called "new games journalism," and for that he must be punished violently. Fortunately his work for Next Gen is far more tolerable, his influences and emotional diarrhea supposedly being reined in by the editorial process.
I'm a bit of a verbose ass myself, but you don't need to know what happened when I sauntered into the local Yoshinoya last night.
He seriously found it intriguing that he was the only guy who rented an Xbox out at an all-night game rental shop in Japan (pay-per-use in-house), and IT MADE HIM FEEL SUPERIOR TO EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE ROOM. He also posted asshole pics of how his brand spanking new PSP was so amazing compared to the obviously going-down-the-shitter DS. The boy's credibility with me is pretty damn low.
Anyway, my take on 360? Nothing will save it in Japan. That's not just wishful thinking. It's not thanks to xenophobia, either. It's about perceived value - the Xbox 360 is in the same boat as the PC-FX, a Japanese system that never got any mass appeal becuse there was almost no compelling software for it at all. The 360, like the Xbox before it, is considered a niche console. That niche, to Japanese gamers, is called "youge." "You" (rhymes with "show") means Western/Occidental. "Ge" is short for "geemu," or "game." Sure, like everything else, there are Japanese fansites for youge, and so obviously there are fans. When MS talks about Japanese Xbox gamers being hardcore gamers, they are talking about a group of people similar to Japanese high school military paraphernalia clubs or model railroad clubs - "Western game fanboys" that are all about GTA, Halo, and sports games. But MS can drop as many "must-have" new franchises aimed strictly at the Japanese as they like, and they wouldn't have any luck. That's because they created the hole they are in now back in the last generation, by ignoring Japanese gamers. For example, releasing non-translated games in Japan at bargain prices was a bad, bad move.
Look at how so many Americans look at GameCube as having no games - that's because most GameCube games come from Japan. * Similarly, most Xbox games come from the West, and so the Japanese at large think it has "no games." MS's strategy just means puts it in the same boat as the GameCube in the West - where "no games" means "only a handful, not enough to make my purchase worthwhile." Nintendo has their own games to push systems, and Japanese third-parties that have hitched their wagons to that star by releasing GameCube games have been fairly rewarded, but the damage done by this kind of shared perception has had a huge impact on Nintendo.
When all the JRPGs, RE5, etc., all hit, and the 360 still fails in Japan, every Western journalist is going to be scratching their heads until they are raw and bloody. That will be fun to watch, not because the 360 failed, but because all the pseudo-experts that have been chanting "Rah-rah beat Sony while they're vulnerable!" will have revealed themselves to be clueless.
* American and European devs had other alternatives to GameCube: PS2 was market leader, Xbox was "the powerhouse console," and the PC was the "traditional" platform. Just watch Capcom's release strategy for the last generation, along with the poor sales that followed from it. (Many of their missteps involve poorly targeted games on the wrong platforms, as well as poorly-received announcements and withdrawals thereof.) Nintendo gave Western developers almost no reason to develop for the GameCube. That is the primary reason Nintendo changed their console hardware strategy with Wii.
That's also in cm^3 and with the PS3s ovoid design in the mind of the consumers won't seem as big.
"This is the same guy who takes 8 paragraphs to say that..."
Read the rest of this comment...
Priceless.
...into making Shenmue 3. There is a waiting market and it might just show that a wholly American based company is willing to play to all markets rather than just the North American $
Oh, grep my post for "verbose ass" and get over it. Selective reading has done you no favors. My point is that he should be writing about GAMES in his GAME REVIEWS, and cutting the bullshit out of his articles would trim them down to less than half their size.
I never said I was economical with my words. Now, would you like to know about the family I met playing horseshoes while picnicking last week, and how that reminded me of a schoolmate I once had? How about if I were to roll that anecdote into a review of a PS2 mahjongg game? Would I get bonus points if I wrote more about the picnic and my friend than about the game?
I have been to Tokyo twice in the last three years. At the time XBox was in stores across various consumer based stores and in the tech sector of Tokyo (Akihabura district - which is a geek haven to say the least). On an informal basis I repeatedly inquired about XBox sales. In general there really aren't any appreciable sales of XBox. Sony PlayStation2 and Nintendo boxes sell as one might expect, but XBox sales are virtually non-existent. Each sales person I talked to said they regularly sold Sony and Nintendo platforms but in some places not one XBox sold. In other stores sales were dismal to say the least and the inventory became more a liability than an asset - dead stock taking up shelf space.
If M$ thinks that they're going to turn this tide with new games for XBox 360 then it just goes to show how much a corporation can delude itself. Like I said, it ain't gonna happen. I could be wrong but seriously would be surprised if XBox 360 had any sales that justified the cost of shipping them in the first place. But let the hype role and more losses for M$' entertainment division.