Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
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!
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.
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.
Well, the Sega Genesis had a bit of a resurgence in Japan, if I recall. The console's popularity in the U.S. boosted its popularity in Japan.
e =0
Also, the Nintendo DS itself has had somewhat of a resurgence. If you look at the weekly charts, the DS had a strong launch, but was slowly declining to PSP-level sales. Then, around the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, it really started to catch on.
See: http://vgcharts.org/japconscomps.php?name1=DS&typ
It's really hard to predict where cultural phenomena will happen.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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
- Demand for detail. Japanese consumers are generally not trained to accept that low price = low quality. Even for entry-level merchandise, you have to at least create the perception that you are not cutting corners. You do this by paying attention to details, like eliminating defect, reducing points of failure, down to proofreading manuals. Japanese engineers and marketers know this and package their wares accordingly. Most foreign vendors don't fully understand this and simply ship low-quality ware for low price points. Low quality, low brand premium, low sales at any price point.
- Sales force quality. Japanese retailers are very demanding on vendor salespeople, and foreign vendors (regardless of industry) often have inferior service compared to locals. Bad salespeople, poor storefront promotion, low sales.
- Stupid expat managers. I've worked with many multinationals in Japan, and I've lost count of expats in management who have no clue about Japan, no inclination to learn anything about Japan, and have no clue in general--yet feel like they know what is best for the company simply because they are from the Headquarters. Naturally, the motivated people get upset and leave, leaving POS engineers and sales force. Bad people, bad product and marketing, low sales.
- Stupid brand management. RCA is (was) a celebrated brand name in the US. It doesn't count for anything in Japan, though, because it didn't have much of a business here. Yet...sometimes foreign vendors get the impression that just because a brand name is established elsewhere that it will work in Japan. Nope--you have to build brands from the ground up. And if your product sucks, that beccomes your brand--low quality, low price, low sales.
- Nationalism. The nationalism leading Japanese consumers not to buy Xbox or RCA isn't really the same as the one behind the "buy American car" movement of the 80s. In the latter, the proponents were advocating buying American cars, regardless of quality, because they fed American workers. The Japanese, in contrast, buy Japanese electronics because they perceive Japanese-made (or at least Japanese-engineered) products to be of higher quality. It isn't really about economy: Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. products made in China sell briskly, and at a premium compared to their Chinese rivals. It also explains why iPods far outsell Japanese vendors: consumers simply accepted that Apple products are as good or better in quality compared to Japanese vendors.
Yeah, there may be some influence by the implicit racism in Japanese culture. But I don't think the challenges for foreign vendors in Japan isn't much more complicated than what Japanese manufacturers had to overcome in the US in the 60s and 70s--trying to build a "made in Japan = good stuff" perception into a prejudiced, racist population after decades of selling them crappy merchandise.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
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.