The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !

The Japanese have a history of not buying consoles/electronics that aren't made in Japan. Microsoft would have to spend a shitload of money on marketing to sell even a small fraction of systems there compared to a Sony or Nintendo, so it's just not worth it to them. Now the rest of Asia(specifically South Korea) is a totally different story, but Japan remains fiercly nationalistic when it comes to their electroncis. Apple is about the only American electronics company that has made some headway there, mostly because there just isn't a legitimate high-end phone offering from most Japanese-based electronics companies.(Samsung being S.Korean and HTC being Tiawanese). The only thing Japan dislikes more than American electronics is electronics from other Asian countries, lol.

That's quitter talk, joe! If your marketing is good enough you can sell anything and it'd have given them brand recognition for future generations and other products. If they had built up the brand there with the X360 and made a real effort then they'd have had a much easier time going into this generation with that region. As it is now the X360 might as well not exist over there (many stores actually completely stopped selling it long ago) and it's unlikely that the X720 will do any better, if not worse.

Oh wait, forward thinking is fucking hard for corporations.

What should Microsoft have done to sell better in Japan, Sean?

Frankly, MS shouldn't waste their time with disc-based Japanese-only games.

The worldwide games (Capcom, Konami, Square) will get a 720 version anyway for the US/UK.
The Japanese only games would be better suited converting to digital-only, XBLA/PSN sales - and its not like it will take much effort to convert from PS4 to 720.

EA (edit: supposedly) cutting 2,000 jobs. The industry's march to ~20 disc-based mega-franchise, a lot of XBLA/PSN/Steam, and a sea of Mobile/Facebook games continued.

Maybe I'm remembering this wrong... but isn't Sean unemployed living of social security? Not really the type of person I'm guessing most corporations would want to take advise from. I apologize if I'm confusing him with someone else.

The Ancient_sl said:

What should Microsoft have done to sell better in Japan, Sean?

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If I knew that I'd be in marketing and probably be paid very well for being able to break past Japan's xenophobia. I know it's an extremely hard market to break into, but giving up to the point where theypull your console from major retailers' shelvesis fuckingsadand not something that Microsoft should have let happen.

I think they had some good ideas at the start of the X360's life with courting developers to make exclusive games for them. Getting Mistwalker on board, which is a studio made up of Hironobu Sakaguchi and the main crew from the old Final Fantasy games who all left Square, was a good start. I think they made a huge mistake in not securing more development with them and other studios and giving them more support. They should have broadened their game and studio portfolio far more than they did instead of dropping all of the support they originally had to focus on promoting Halo and getting timed-exclusivity with CoD map packs and promoting that. Yes, that made them successful in NA, but it tanked them everywhere else. I think they'd be in a much better position globally if they had kept up and expanded the variety that the system originally had.

Lenaldo_sl said:

Maybe I'm remembering this wrong... but isn't Sean unemployed living of social security? Not really the type of person I'm guessing most corporations would want to take advise from. I apologize if I'm confusing him with someone else.

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This is a terrible post because you could essentially say this about any topic that anyone talks about in which they aren't an "expert" or it isn't their "field". What the fuck does Sean's personal life have to do with anything?

I see you posted in the Car thread a recommendation to buy the base model of a car. Do you manufacture cars? No? Then you have no frame of reference judging by your logic.

In conclusion, shut the fuck up because you're out of your element!

Sean_sl said:

If I knew that I'd be in marketing and probably be paid very well for being able to break past Japan's xenophobia. I know it's an extremely hard market to break into, but giving up to the point where theypull your console from major retailers' shelvesis fuckingsadand not something that Microsoft should have let happen.

I think they had some good ideas at the start of the X360's life with courting developers to make exclusive games for them. Getting Mistwalker on board, which is a studio made up of Hironobu Sakaguchi and the main crew from the old Final Fantasy games who all left Square, was a good start. I think they made a huge mistake in not securing more development with them and other studios and giving them more support.

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Which console do you think did better on JRPGs at the beginning of the product cycle?

Well, the PS3 has only sold around 9 million units in Japan. In comparison, the PS2 sold 21 million units. Japan simply isn't the huge market that it used to be.

Personally, I think Microsoft's biggest mistake was not focusing harder on Europe. They should have acquired more European development houses and arranged more exclusives with European devs to get more Euro-centric games out there. They should have worked harder to deliver better entertainment services in Europe, too.

They were far too US focused this gen, which may fuck them over next gen.

The Ancient_sl said:

Which console do you think did better on JRPGs at the beginning of the product cycle?

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The X360 without question, it wasn't even a competition. I didn't even buy a PS3 until a couple years into its life due to the lack of games on it.

Yeah, exactly. It's not like Xbox360 was marketed so poorly over there that the Japanese didn't know that too, so why exactly would the console fail over there?

To me the always online thing is not a breaking point at all. I live in a big city with very stable internet so I could care less. I will choose whatever system has a better games OR what system the majority of my friends end up getting. Maybe its from years of playing MMO's that always online doesn't really phase me anymore.

The Ancient_sl said:

Yeah, exactly. It's not like Xbox360 was marketed so poorly over there that the Japanese didn't know that too, so why exactly would the console fail over there?

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Xenophobia, Microsoft fostering the Xbro image, Microsoft completely dropping support for developers and third party exclusivity a couple years in?

It's not like they completely failed right out of the gate. It was never strong over there, but it didn't hit rock bottom until after they fiercely pursued the Lol Xbro Call of Halos Mt Dew YEAH image and dropped all third party exclusivity support witheveryother genre. Their first party studios went total shit too, I can't believe how badly they wasted their acquisition of Rare.

Utnayan_sl said:

You realize Microsoft does this as well. $7.99 a month for Xbox Live Service. That's $95.88 for the year. Buy the year, and you can find it as low as $39-49 online via Microsoft cards.

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I've actually seen it go as low as $35 from my daily watching of slickdeals.net. I imagine that Microsoft gets most of their XBL Gold sales via auto-renewal though.

My best deal on it was buying 4 3 month cards at $13 each at Best Buy for $52 total that also came with 800 MS points each ($10 each, so $40 worth total). So that works out to me basically buying $40 worth of points and getting a year of XBL Gold for $12 if you look at it one way.

Btw Cor, this article says that Nintendo had a positive net income for the last fiscal year:http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/a...disclosed.aspx

Sean_sl said:

Many of the smaller ones don't develop for the X360 at all and never have. Games don't really sell any copies on the X360 over there at all and the only reason they exist is because they need to make a X360 version to sell to the Western markets. Microsoftreallyfucked up by ignoring Japan, imo. They basically gave up on an entire region with a fairly substantial potential customer base.

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This is a nice piece of revisionist history considering Microsoft made a big effort to court small japanese devs before the launch of the X360 and made the dev kits very affordable. That's one of the reason why just about every single japanese shoot'em up is made for the X360 with very few of them ending on other consoles.

joeboo_sl said:

The Japanese have a history of not buying consoles/electronics that aren't made in Japan. Microsoft would have to spend a shitload of money on marketing to sell even a small fraction of systems there compared to a Sony or Nintendo, so it's just not worth it to them. Now the rest of Asia(specifically South Korea) is a totally different story, but Japan remains fiercly nationalistic when it comes to their electroncis. Apple is about the only American electronics company that has made some headway there, mostly because there just isn't a legitimate high-end phone offering from most Japanese-based electronics companies.(Samsung being S.Korean and HTC being Tiawanese). The only thing Japan dislikes more than American electronics is electronics from other Asian countries, lol.

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Yeah... No. Japanese have a history of not buying shitty products. Apple was selling mountains of iPods when many japanese companies were competing with other digital music players, but their products were simply not as slick. As for phones, until recently the leader in Japan was Sharp, and with also Fujitsu, NEC or Sony Mobile, there is no shortage of japanese high-end mobile phone manufacturer. Here again, Apple's design, attention to detail (and brand management) prevailed.

Also, the original XBox did not sell because of catastrophic marketing, lack of japanese games and also because it was slightly bigger than your average tokyoite apartment. The X360 fared much better, but it suffered again from poor communication and from the damage done to the brand by the previous machine. The average japanese gamer just does not feel he is the target of the X360. You can sing the praises of Xbox live voice chat and online FPS for ages, japanese gamers will still have a strange relationship to online multiplayer and to FPS.

That happenedat first, but it stopped being true after a couple years into the life of the console. That's not revisionist history, that's fact. I have a ton of PS3 games from small Japanese developers that are not available on the X360. Most of my PS3 library is made up of them for that matter. Meanwhile the majority of my X360 library is made up of Western developed games and most of the Japanese ones that I do have came from the first two years of the console's life.