Doesn't "360" Place You Back Where You Started?
Posted by: j_john | From: March 24, 2006
Browsing last week's issue of BusinessWeek I came across an article entitled Sony's iPod Assault is No Threat to Apple that seemed historically significant. I'm always interested in the changing electronic trends, especially when Sony is concerned. They came out of seemingly nowhere to completely dominate the video game industry and push Nintendo out of the way, and in a reversal Apple has done the same thing in the portable music market with the iPod. Remember the Walkman? Me neither.
Another magazine I now read regularly (big thanks to Cabel and Mike for the international subscription) is EDGE, the UK's best videogame publication. Their February issue has an article about how dismal the Xbox 360 launch was in Japan. While the recently released DS Lite brought out thousands upon thousands of people willing to wait in line for hours (Japan apparently isn't down with pre-orders), the 360 was met with lines of, well, about 20.
Microsoft will probably blame the Japanese market for not understanding their extreme vision, or just resort to their line about how difficult it is to penetrate the traditional videogame culture over there. Meanwhile, Apple is having no problems being successful overseas--the BW article states, "In January, Apple had 45% of the Japanese market for digital music players, vs. 15% for Sony." Sure, music and videogames are different markets, but isn't it about time Microsoft admitted they don't have anything to offer the Japanese gamer?
I guess the conventional wisdom is that the japanese market doesn't really care about network multiplayer, which is kind of what microsoft concentrates on, especially with this generation. also, the launch titles for xbox both sucked, and were pretty much as american as possible.
i think microsoft should admit that it doesn't really give a shit about the japanese market, but that would obviously piss off their japanese 3rd party developers.
Posted by: drew at April 3, 2006 10:13 PM