Not even Bill Gates could sell the Xbox in Japan

A GameCentral reader living in Japan gives his explanation for why Western games, and the Xbox brand, have never been popular in the country.

Xbox is to Japan as a rude sketch is to a dutiful student’s text book: an amusing, but ultimately distasteful distraction. I know lots of gamers in Japan and have closely followed the games industry there since the days of the features in Super Play Magazine back in the early ’90s.

When I first moved to Tokyo in 2006 the Xbox 360 had recently been released and the PlayStation 3 was imminent; yet there were few signs of the PlayStation 2 losing any of its momentum. In fact you would have been lucky to find more than half a shelf of Xbox games in most retail shops for several more years to come.



My friend Makoto bought an Xbox 360 because, apart from being able to pick one up very cheaply (I got one myself), he mostly mixed in international circles. He was however an exception to the norm. Slowly though the allocated shelf space grew and more of a niche market began to emerge, in no small part due to a growing affinity with Western styles of development and a few well-received Japanese role-players and anime-based games. It was good to see a broadening of ideas, but at no point did anybody expect it to break out of that niche market.


Since then, Microsoft have only ever made half-hearted attempts to appease the Japanese market (the publishing of Blue Dragon springs to mind), as clearly their main demographic has always lain within the United States. There has never been anywhere near the volume of titles directly marketed for Japanese tastes as on Nintendo or Sony’s machines.

Microsoft’s rivals also exclusively release coloured and themed consoles in the East, and then there is Nintendo’s wonderful Stars catalogue that makes its UK counterpart look like Poundland after a Christmas sale. Regardless of whether or not they even want to compete with this, there are a good number of reasons why Microsoft will always have a hard sell in Japan.

Firstly, the majority of multiplayer gaming is a different kind of social experience. Online competitive multiplayer is mostly consigned to PC gamers in Japan, and the preferred mode of communal gaming takes place within the society in which one lives. For example: StreetPass, mobile multiplayer on public transport, in the arcades, or simply gathered in front of the TV at home. The Wii, DS, and PSP all embraced these multiplayer modes and have consistently outsold everything else, even beyond their commonly perceived lifespan.

Although you could point towards similarities in the West, it doesn’t compare anywhere near on the same scale. During my early years in Japan I would occasionally take my PlayStation 2 memory card with me to my small local arcade to pit my Master League team up against others doing likewise on the Pro Evolution Soccer cabinet. Arcades like this are in their abundance, not just in the city centres, but locally too.

Even today it’s a rare thing to use the Tokyo subway and not to see a group of youngsters huddled by the doors with their portable consoles. Almost everybody of all ages plays mobile games of some sort, and if I’m not watching somebody playing, then inevitably somebody is leaning over my shoulder to watch what I’m playing.



So where does Microsoft fit into all this? The simple answer is that they don’t. To many Japanese I speak to Microsoft project an image of ‘anti-social’ multiplayer gaming. That is to say, the focus is on competitive games between players somewhere across the globe who don’t know one another. It goes against the very nature of what Japanese gamers enjoy most about multiplayer gaming: social togetherness.

It’s no wonder games like Animal Crossing and Monster Hunter are so popular – there’s just so much to swap and to share. At one stage of Microsoft’s ill-fated Xbox One unveiling, they actually advocated ‘trash-talking’ your friends when referring to Call Of Duty. Japanese gamers balk at this kind of thing, and mostly view it as an American oddity.

There are of course Japanese gamers who don’t adhere to their gaming status quo, but because the conventional styles of play and companies’ marketing strategies reflect cultural ideologies so closely, they are in fact few and far between. For Japan, this combined with an unwavering home brand loyalty, means Microsoft consoles are most likely destined to remain an acquired taste.

By reader evilsee (Steam/Nintendo ID)

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk.