Thinking Outside the NeXt Box

[Scourge]

We all know Microsoft has decent positioning in North America and Europe, but the Xbox is damn near dead in Japan. What do you think Microsoft can do for the next generation to win over Japan? My ideas are these:

1) Outsource the manufacture of the Japanese Xbox 2 to a Japanese company, perhaps one of the other large electronics companies competing with Sony. The style of the system should be different from that of the US hardware and it should launch first in Japan, by six or nine months and have the Japanese electronics company's name as top billing on the system.

2) The Japanese version of the system should have capabilities only available to the Japanese market. Maybe MS should directly challenge Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market and launch their own tiny gaming machine coinciding with the launch of their next console in Japan, if not also packed in.

3) MS should really push to gain an exclusive from Square Enix and Konami to launch with the next Xbox. It could be a killer opportunity to even have one of these exclusives as a pack-in at launch.

4) They should not use the Xbox name in any way, shape or form for their next Japanese machine(s) to try to separate themselves from that brand in Japan.

I'm just curious what they really plan to do to reverse what has happened in Japan with their first system. At this point, do you think they should even launch a second system in Japan, given the current performance of the Xbox there? Does/should Japan even matter?

--Scourge .

[cka]

/me watches tumbleweeds roll by

[Opaque]

pointless...

[StriderKyo]

There's no trick to it, it's not any kind of secret. Lock up the Japanese 3rd parties and don't take up half the average Tokyo living room with your system and you're set. Anything else has always led to failure.

[Jeremy]

They need to garner up some Japanese 3rd parties that folks actually care about. A miracle or two couldn't hurt either.

[Schlep]

I'm still upset that Microsoft decided to put in region lockout in the end.

[Shin Johnpv]

dont use that green

[Diff-chan]

I want to say that Microsoft has learned a lot about the Japanese market from the Xbox.

But then I use Microsoft Word's Japanese IME. Its a horrible, horrible piece of software in every way (yes, I realize its designed for English OSes who want Japanese support tacked on, but bear with me). Easily one of the worst pieces of software I have ever encountered... insipidly designed, amazingly unelegant, a total hack, and unbelievably counterproductive - it takes me about four or five times longer to type something in Japanese than it does just to write it out. There is no doubt in my mind that with a few months of work I could design a much better solution than the one they got.

I mean... Word is a piece of garbage but this IME is ten times worse. So... I wonder.

[Mfkzt]

Gundam games and bukkake simulators.

[Blaster1]

buy some japanese developers to make games instead of buying wastes of space and crap exclusives, apparently ms still hasnt learnt their lesson as rumors continue of them buying more american developers, they need to get a fucking clue and buy capcom, namco, or even sega, as well as some smaller japanese development houses like spike and aki, then they would start getting somewhere