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Was Blue Dragon What X360 Needed In Japan?
simoniker writes "Have major RPG Blue Dragon and other Microsoft efforts paved the way for Japanese Xbox 360 success? 8-4 Ltd's John Ricciardi and Kotaku's Japanese correspondent Brian Ashcraft have been talking about the issue, with Ricciardi commenting on Gears Of War's recent appearance in the Japanese Top 10 game chart, with 33,000 units sold in one week: 'I mean, granted, everything is relative — so yes, in a market where the average 360 game sells around 5,000 copies, 30,000 or so may seem like a big deal, but at the end of the day, their userbase is not expanding. The week Gears came out they only sold a little over 7,000 pieces of hardware. It's not enough.'"
'I mean, granted, everything is relative -- so yes, in a market where the average 360 game sells around 5,000 copies, 30,000 or so may seem like a big deal, but at the end of the day, their userbase is not expanding. The week Gears came out they only sold a little over 7,000 pieces of hardware. It's not enough.'
Microsoft needs to get on the ball and release their Zephyr hardware revision, with HDMI, 120GB drive, and integrated HD-DVD. People know it's coming, and so they're probably waiting for it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The obvious answer is no, Blue-Dragon was not what the XBox 360 needed in japan being that the XBox 360 is still the worst selling videogame system in the country ...
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At the same time it should be noted that there are more pieces of XBox 360 software being sold than PS3 software which implies the PS3 "aint doin so hot"
The first Xbox did horribly in Japan too...why should we have expected the 360 to be much different?
Living With a Nerd
Yes, a high-quality exclusive game that appeals to the Japanese market was what they needed, and desperately.
Was Blue Dragon sufficient?
No, obviously not. One game is never going to turn a console from an abject failure into a success all by itself. Few people will buy a console when only one game out of the entire library interests them, and so it is with the 360.
Blue dragon is what MS needed, past tense, to show they had a chance at all in Japan. What they need, present tense, is another Blue Dragon, and another, so that people will have multiple reasons to want one, and to hope that more games they'll like will come out. Even still MS being successfull in Japan is very iffy, but without this, failure is guaranteed. Sort of like when a paramedic needs a defribulator, even though it may not save the patient -- their other option is to sit by and note the time of death.
The enemies of Democracy are
MS just doesn't get that they just don't get Japan. The Xbox games are all very Western and Japan just doesn't enjoy them. I mean look at where 90% of FPS games come from, then look where 90% of RPGs come from, there is a very clear difference between the two markets and MS need to understand this.
I like muppets.
I wonder how well it fits into the average Japanese home?
The Xbox 360 is a high quality game system at least on par with the PS3. The fact that the Japanese public won't buy it is basically proof in my eyes that they won't buy ANY American products. There's always some excuse about how the product isn't marketed right or built to their tastes, but the bottom line is they are biased against American products at the same time they are killing many of our industries.
I am aware that certain fad products make it through (like Levis and Ipods), just like we buy some of their fads. But its time our policians wised up and quit treating Free Yrade like a religion.
Isn't it an amazing irony that, even in the Japanese console market, the Lunix solution (PS3) is still chasing the tail lights of the Microsoft solution (XBox 360)?
Some things never change, it seems!
Gaming culture has expanded drastically, that is for certain, in fact, once it left its base of nerds fiddling around in the basement, it's become fragmented into a number of very opposing sub units. Maybe Microsoft's thinking is that they're doing really well with the whole frat-boy image. If they were to start also catering to the jRock crowd, you might get a lot of 15 year olds and frat boys starting to say, "The XBox360 is for faggots!" So they've been picking and chosing their games carefully in which to maintain their rough-neck image.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Japan doesn't want the Xbox. Does the Xbox want Japan?
I am not saying this as an economic nationalist. I am saying this as a gamer who rode the RPG wave in the mid-90s. Back then, the transition to optical media allowed much more content (viz. cut-scenes) and the RPG was the perfect genre to fully realize this technological change. Japanese developers refined this genre to a high art. However, they also learned some bad habits, and began pumping out tons of crappy, cookie-cutter RPGs. The Japanese market became addicted to RPG junk food, and I think that the quality of Japanese games and gamer tastes has declined relative to the American market ever since the RPG wave crested.
Meanwhile, American FPS games became remarkably sophisticated. I have not coded for games, but I have been led to believe that an FPS is the hardest kind of game to make while an RPG is relatively easy. (Technically speaking, of course. Content is always hard.) It seems that the American gaming industry and the American gaming market are hungrier for good products than their Japanese counterparts. Nintendo is branching out in a new direction which may prove fertile, but Sony really seems to have dropped the ball. And ever since Enix bought Square, the quality of their RPGs has been declining. I think that the Japanese are suffering from timidity and conservatism.
Dare I say it: have we supplanted the Japanese as the leaders in the worldwide gaming industry? Is Japan a gaming afterthought?
Japan => Iraq
Microsoft => Bush administration
Xbox 360 software vendors in Japan => American soldiers in Iraq
Sony fanboys => Sunni fanatics
Nintendo worshippers => Shiite fanatics
Xbox lovers => Pro-American Iraqis before invation
Xbox 360 lovers => Pro-American Iraqis after invasion
Marketing efforts to date => "Mission accomplished"
Blue Dragon => "The Surge"
So with the same reasoning Sega's Saturn and Dreamcast could have been succesfull if they only would have had more typical Japanese games and RPG's?
The X360 is good in FPS, racing and Western RPG's. It basicly offers beter graphics over the previous generation of consoles. Thats all it does. You need to invest a lot of money to upgrade your graphics experience. A new console, a HDTV and buy all the old games upgraded for the next gen console.
The only payoff I see is the new graphics. With the typical console game viewing distance and the fact that most people don't (yet) have a HDTV the increased resolution and graphics don't make a lot of difference in everyday use.
Maybe Nintendo is on to something with their new controller thing....
"Oh HDMI is overkill component is just fine!" Yes component is just fine for some people but I don't want 5 cables hooked into my reciever I want 1. I want everything centralized and instead of running tons of wires everywhere I want 1 cables that does 1 thing and can plug into all my devices and not require a bajillion cables to do it. Simplicity at it's finest. "120 GB is ridiculously big! Why do you need it?" HD shows which you can now download are peaking over 4GB each for 30-45min. Now that you can download HD content right to your box AND use your xbox as a soon to be DVR you will be filling up that XBOX's meager HD in no time. I for one want to watch 6 episodes of 24 in HD with maybe a few movies stored on it with all the details all on my XBOX. If you haven't seen what HD does to your storage capacity then you don't understand why more is better. "HD-DVD is a waste! my regular DVD is just fine" Regular DVD's don't do 1080p, regular dvd's don't have features that I think are neat and interesting like skinning or frame replacing that HD-DVD offers. I want something for the future that is coming out NOW rather than be limited by something my old xbox does well i.e. play regular dvd's. Hi definition content is NOW, not tommorow, not next year, it's here NOW. IF Microsoft wants my money, wants me to own a piece of their equipment they need to move to the future and not the analog past. 1 Device, 1 Plug, 1 single setup to run all my HD-Content. The only thing holding me back is MS.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Ok, I will admit that once you add in HD video that free space magically disappears off the Drive. Hell Superman Returns is 7 gigs by itself in 720p. My Issue though is that for most things the 20 gig HDD is more than enough space. However, for those who do need more space why not throw a bone to the 360 owners (Even Core System owners) and let us stream it from our PC?
If MS added a free download that lets a user's home PC (XP, or Vista) work as a NAS (even if it required the Windows Genuine Annoyance check) many users (including myself) would applaud them. It would allow me to increase my available capacity at no extra charge.
The files are DRM'ed anyway, so why not?
And I bought a Dreamcast just to play Tetris on a big screen. Somehow, your purchase seems leet and mine seems more than a little tragic. :-)
:-) I never took you up on your kind offer of an account for testing but I would be willing to buy access. I'll drop you an email requesting sign-up particulars.
OT - I notice that you've stuck by the decision to keep the occulus index page as low-key as possible.