Does The 360 Really Need the Jap Market?

To be honest, even the release of DOA4 didn't set the Japanese game playing public on fire did it ??
The 360 is still selling miserably (usually hanging around number 7 in hardware sales with only the X-box and GBA selling less)
 
The Japanese market is very niche. The only difference in this generation is the 'side' markets which are there to be exploited. Sure M$ might not break the Japanese market in hardware sales but the secondary sales from indy developers who WILL develop for the 360 Marketplace may drive a nice market for 360

From early indications of practically zero online strategy from SONY I think they are missing out on a huge chunk of this generations marketshare. When gen4 comes around there will be a new metric for measuring success and that will be the extra's over and above hardware/killer app. SONY may totally miss that on this generation and I really don't thnk the Killer App will be as important in the future as it was in earlier generations.
 
Who cares if it breaks japan. As long as we are well caterd for I dont care. I dont care who wins the coverted console battle, as long as sony, microsoft and nintendo furnish us with amazing games consoles and games! I'll leave the japs to there jap ways and let them continue to worship sony! It dosent make my gaming experience any worse.
 
does japan need the xbox 360?

the xbox needs the japan market, of course it does.

the euro market may be large, but it is massively fragmented interms of demand, and in terms of the number of variations each game must take to account for the languages. hence why it is a less attractive market to sell into (hence we lose out big time on game releases/prices etc)

so tis probably the least attractive, hence why it hasnt been harvested fully yet, the US and JPN markets are probably reaching saturation point, so the only area of profitable growth is Euro, which has a relatively small base to grow from hence why it is showing such % growth.
 
I think sony should be more worried then they make out to be
after all Yanks are very loyal to their country as well.
I think their is a good chance that consumers in the states might jump ship and suport the Xbox360? like the japs support the playstation brand

And the USA market is the biggest in the world sony wouldnt want to get beat their..
 
Valleyman said:
If M$ want to crack the japanese market they need to flood the market with the usual japanese crap.

Seriously, there are literally thousands of games released in Japan every year, and the law of averages tells us that once in a while a game will be good... they're the japanese games we get over here.

But the japanese top 10 games probably arn't a huge proportion of the market. I mean over here the top ten chart probably counts for a large majority of the sales. In japan however, go into a video game store and for every person picking up a copy of a top ten game there are five picking up crap like "Dog racing bets", "Waterskiing bets", "Wuzel fights monkey man for money"... seriously... gambling games are HUGE. And the others are weird... From what I can gather strange crappy rpgs, pointless "hit 3 buttons in time to music to pull of a speacial move" scripted fighting game, and weird ass gambling games make up a lot of the market.

I'm not saying all japanese studios are crap... some produce excellent games. But Japanese people like weird games... yes they'll want an xbox 360 for DOA4. But if they can't get their strange games fix to go along with it there isn't much else to draw them towards an xbox 360.
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If only you knew what you were talking about. Literally 1000s of games released? 2005 saw the release of...
464 PS2 games,
47 GC games,
39 XBox games,
10 360 games,
85 GBA games,
95 PSP games,
110 DS games
and 2 DC games.

My maths suggests thats 852. Ok that doesn't include PC games but PC gaming is very small here.

There are also plenty of good JP games you don't get in Europe or America. Your comment about the break down of the market is also wrong, the last issue of Famitsu I picked up (sales data from the 360s release week)...
1. DS Mario Kart
2. PS2 RPG
3. PS2 Action
4. Animal Crossing
5. Some PS2 train like game that I don't know the name of.
6. PS2 Resi 4
7. DS Tamagotchi
8. GBA Pokemon
9. DS Pokemon
10. PSP Monster Hunter Portable
11. GBA Megaman
12. DS Brain Training
13. DS Brain Training other version
14. GC Mario Party 7
15. DS Boardgame collection
16. DS Slime MoriMori: Dragon Quest 2 (Action Adventure)
17. DS Nintendogs
18. DS Dragonball Z
19. XBox360 Ridge Racer 6
20. DS Kouchuu Ouja Mushi King: Greatest Champion e no Michi DS (Action)

I see no gambling games in the top 20. I've also probably been to more game shops than you have here in Japan and there really aren't that many gambling games. Yes there are different tastes in Japan and that's partly the reason the 360 did badly here, so is the fact that we got Tetris as a launch title.... they try to sell the 360 as an awesome gaming system and one of the 5 or 6 games we get at launch is HD Tetris? ... That's just retarded.
 
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