Hero of Hyrule
Frieren the Slayer
- Pronouns
- He/Him
U.S. video game console maker Xbox has never made its mark on Japan in terms of sales, but after two decades and several missteps, it has no plans to give up.
“We’ve been on this journey for a long time, and we’re not letting up,” Sarah Bond, Xbox’s corporate vice president of game creator experience and ecosystem, said in an interview with The Washington Post after returning from Tokyo.
Bond said Xbox is betting the company’s investment in a slate of Asian titles will pay off and show Xbox is more than just Halo and Forza. Typically, Asian players have preferred to buy PlayStation and Nintendo devices, where they can find more Japanese role-playing games and narrative-based games.
Bond said there are over 250 developers in Japan building over 150 games to date, including titles like “Tetris Effect: Connected” and “Craftopia.” Those titles will get to live on the Xbox platform, even if many are not exclusives. During the Tokyo Game Show, Xbox announced that preexisting PlayStation mainstay titles like “Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Anniversary Edition” and “Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch” are now available on Game Pass. It has plans to bring “Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes” and several Persona titles to Game Pass over the next year.
“While Xbox Series devices are not predicted to sell anywhere near the level of Sony’s PS5 over the coming years, Microsoft is now more competitive than it has been for at least a decade [in Japan],” said Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at the market research firm Ampere Analysis. “That shows that Microsoft’s approach to the market is paying dividends.”
For the Xbox Series X and Series S console launch in 2020, the company released the new consoles in Japan simultaneously with other parts of the world. The Xbox Series X generation is the best-selling one to date, according to Microsoft. Harding-Rolls’s market research firm found Xbox sold fewer than 100,000 consoles in Japan last year, compared to Sony and Nintendo’s combined sales of over 6.7 million.
Harding-Rolls said Microsoft’s small improvements on a tiny market share trailed badly behind Japanese consoles and mobile devices.
In June, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer acknowledged that Japanese developers don’t always come to Xbox and the company has been working on adding more games from the country, such as the upcoming Persona titles and an unannounced game that Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima is overseeing. Persona game developer Atlus did not respond to a request for comment.
Bond was tight-lipped about her meeting with Spencer and Kojima last week, simply saying, “We’re working with creators in Japan to create really special things for people who play on Xbox, and we’re going to keep doing that.”
SOURCE
Microsoft's concerted efforts to win over Japan are definitely showing, and it remains to be seen whether or not this current round of attempts is going to be sustained, or if it will be another flash in the pan moment like back in the 360 era, where they started similarly strong, and then lost interest in a few years. Whatever ends up happening, it's good that Microsoft is not putting all eggs in one basket (as their three pronged strategy with the Xbox consoles, Game Pass, and cloud shows), and if nothing else, at least a bunch of formerly de facto PlayStation exclusive games and franchises had that stranglehold broken and those games available to broader markets.