Name: Why Xbox Failed In Japan
Uploaded: 2019-12-04T09:42:10.000Z
Duration: 12 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

These people are waiting to buy the Xbox One console.

Fans line up around the world for the newest gaming consoles and

products. But there's one place that's never seen a reaction like

Japan. In the early 2000s, when Microsoft launched the Xbox, Japan

Japan was home to three big console makers — Nintendo, Sega and Sony.

And Japanese game developers were considered the best and most

Around the time of the launch of the Xbox, Japanese game developers

The success of any new game platform depended in large measure on

whether or not you can get the best Japanese game developers and

their titles, more importantly, on your platform.

So when Microsoft launched the Xbox in 2001, the gaming world was

suspicious of an American console made by a company known for its

They were kind of perceived as the bad guy coming into the Japanese

market, kind of invading the homeland and competing with Sony and

Nintendo. All three launches of the Xbox were a total failure in

Japan. But at the same time, since its debut in 2001, the Xbox has

become one of the biggest consoles globally.

The release of the Xbox One in 2013 was a huge success for Microsoft.

For the three years following its release, the Xbox One was the

world's second-most popular gaming console of its generation.

million units worldwide through the second quarter of 2019, but only

a tiny fraction of global sales — just 0.3

So why has the Xbox never caught on in Japan, despite its worldwide

acclaim elsewhere? When Microsoft started developing the

Xbox in 1999, it wasn't known as a gaming company.

Its reputation was all about PCs, its office products and a big

antitrust lawsuit. Microsoft had a PC gaming business in the late 90s

known for Microsoft Flight Simulator and Age of Empires.

Developing the Xbox was all part of Microsoft's plan to bring its

Sony was the leader in the consumer electronics market in the early

2000s. Its PlayStation 2 was considered a threat to Microsoft for its

potential to replace PCs as a way to get Internet access at home.

Bill Gates's motivation was more about maintaining Microsoft's

dominance and position and ecosystem of software.

Bill really got it because games are software that is entertainment

Denise Chaudhari, a designer who worked on the original Xbox,

remembers that Microsoft got into gaming as a challenge to Sony.

Bill Gates wanted to get Microsoft technology into Sony consoles, so

he went to Japan and suggested a partnership.

Microsoft, Bill Gates specifically, saw an opportunity to take

something that was established that Sony was already doing the

PlayStation and sort of integrate technology and software that

Microsoft was the master of, which was home computing and kind of

bring that together. Sony was not interested.

Sony was basically like, thanks, but no thanks.

And Bill Gates said, okay, then I'll do it myself.

Video game journalist Dean Takahashi thinks companies were wary of

working with Microsoft because of its antitrust lawsuits.

happening against Microsoft and everybody knew that if you sort of

let them in the door, it was kind of like a Trojan horse.

You might lose control of your business the way say the P.C.

makers like IBM had lost control of the business.

This wasn't the first time Microsoft would hear a no from a Japanese

Chaudhari says Mitsumi, the company that made circuit boards for

Sony's PlayStation controllers at the time, refused to make a circuit

Mitsumi could have jeopardized its relationship with Sony by giving

Mitsumi didn't respond to CNBC's requests for comment.

So Chaudhari had to use a larger circuit board for the Xbox

controller. Microsoft moved quickly to launch the Xbox.

in November 2001 and in Japan in February 2002, later than expected.

Microsoft has released three consoles in the Xbox series, the Xbox,

While all three console releases failed in Japan, the Xbox was a huge

Microsoft eventually secured the coveted No.

1 spot in the global market from 2011 to 2012 with the Xbox 360.

Nobody expected we were going to be a hit product in Japan and we

understood what the playing field was like and we were just trying to

Sega, Nintendo and Sony dominated the video game market in Japan when

Before the Xbox launched, Sony and Nintendo devices accounted for

basically 100 percent of the global video game market and not much

As of 2019, sales of the Xbox don't even begin to rival that of the

There are three main reasons the Xbox console didn't sell well in

game developers are from all over the world.

But in the early 2000s, most of the best developers were Japanese and

at the time the Xbox launched, Japanese game creators were hesitant

to put their content on a console that wasn't popular in Japan.

Japanese gamers and developers favorite role playing games over the

shooter style games that were more common in the U.S.

In order to convince gamers to switch to Xbox, Microsoft needed big

name Japanese developers to defect from Sony and Nintendo.

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Why Xbox Failed In Japan

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