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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."
There, no, just a little right... yes, thats it. You had some Sony goo at the corner of your mouth.
You don't need to be pro-Sony in order to read a sales chart. Here are last week's console sales, for one example:
Nintendo DS Lite - 153,566
PSP - 25,935
PS2 - 23,133
Nintendo DS - 3,504
Game Boy Advance SP - 2,919
X360 - 1,897
Game Boy Micro - 1,443
GameCube - 1,002
Game Boy Advance - 17
Xbox - 8
The DS lite sold around 80 times more units than the Xbox 360. The 6 year old PS2 sold more than ten times as many units.
This is not going to change, ever. It's over, unless you can name one case in the history of game consoles where a year after launch, after languishing completely out of public consciousness for so long and so far behind the competition, a console has come roaring back to be a success. In any territory, much less Japan. It just doesn't happen. Places can change, a company that's in 1st place and slip to 2nd and vice versa, but never can a console just be so totally out of the popular culture and ever hope to challenge the big boys.
This talk of "comeback" is a misnomer as well, because it implies that the situation was different at some point. In order to have a comeback, you have to have been popular before. That's not the case with the 360 in Japan. The 360 in Japan just has no place in popular consciousness - it's not that people hate it, it's that they just don't think about it. You can't reverse perceptions (a "comeback") if there's no perception to reverse. The 360 just isn't considered. And it's not for lack of marketing, either - MS has spent plenty of money on ads, to no avail.
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.
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
Except the PS3 is just as overpriced in Japan as it is in Europe, and Japanese gamers are mocking it just as hard as the western ones.
2 eng.html4 93740
http://www.geocities.jp/route_219a/flash/ps3_exp0
http://blog.wired.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=1
http://dokoaa.com/ps3wii.html#hikaku