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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.
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!
That hasn't stopped the iPod from selling in Japan.
Per ardua ad astra.
I think you're confusing Japan with the US.
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.
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
I think it's more a case of gaijin syndrome. Japan is pretty nationalistic, and the competition are both Japanese companies.
Remove the microsoft logo and put on a Japanese companies name, no hardware or software lineup changes needed. I guarantee sales would quadruple overnight.
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.
No console maker allows H games (except for Sony on the PSP), that's what the PC is for.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
...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 $
This simply is not true. Apple is huge over in Japan, and their iPod has outsold anything and everything Sony has released, and countless other Japanese and other Asian based companies. The same can be said about a whole ton of other markets.
Japan doesn't have a problem with Microsoft being a western company, it's just that Microsoft just doesn't have the lineups that the Japanese market craves. Microsoft needs to simply invest huge amounts of cash into companies like Square/Enix, Atlus, Bandai, etc. They need the games made exclusively for their system, and not side projects, but actual games that wont be on the PS3 or Wii. They will win no love for having FFXI on their console when it is available on the PS2 and PC.
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.