Depends entirely on their buying habits. The UK certainly had the best demographics in the EU for Microsoft.
Business Approach Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox
- Thread starter BRiT
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Depends entirely on their buying habits. The UK certainly had the best demographics in the EU for Microsoft.
"Just" the Benelux and Scandanavia are the entirety of the countries MS dropped besides Russia and Switzerland, so it's funny how you wrote "just" like it's the tip of the iceberg
It's all about console purchasing rates and it generally goes USA<>UK>>rest of Europe (especially for Xbox). The countries MS dropped into tier 2 make up 16% of the population of the original launch (tier 1 countries ~1B, tier 2 countries ~200m, 140m of which is in Russia), if you dont do any adjusting for buying rates. If you do, I imagine it's as I said, less than 5% by unit volume (because most of the population MS dropped is concentrated in Russia, which will have very low console buying rates per capita compared to EU). I think certainly less than 10%.
It's a tempting theory to say MS is hoarding units for the important countries for them, but it's just not true by the evidence.
Xbox is actually fairly well received in Scandanavia compared to some other parts of EU, so that one kind of hurts I think, but at the end of the day it's countries of 5m 5m and 10m, which is small.
Yup.
It makes more sense anyway, it's a small part of the units they sell but they just dropped the different countries they have to support by what, 40%?
Occam's Razor indicates supply issues.
MS could just ship XB1 with UK english localization in Benelux and Scandinavia. Don't know about Belgium, but english is a strong second language in Holland, Luxemburg and all of Scandinavia. The same way prior console were launched in these territories.
Cheers
Other consoles weren't affected by regional accents. If a core feature of XB1 is the voice control, and that doesn't work reliably in non-English countries even if they are fluent in English, then you'll be releasing a sub-par experience; effectively a beta release of your new product with the promise that you'll fix it later but until then, can people please muddle through, maybe not use the voice controls so much and get used to non-voice interaction...
I don't think Occam's Razor is working one way or the other, for both explanations have legitimate concerns and sound logic.
Personally I'm more inclined to believe it's a localisation thing as Ranger's numbers show. MS wouldn't need a massive number of boxes to satisfy those markets, at least to make a token launch and get the ball rolling, while the localisation is essential to present a good first impression. But I wouldn't back that opinion with any great conviction!
I don't think Occam's Razor is working one way or the other, for both explanations have legitimate concerns and sound logic.
Personally I'm more inclined to believe it's a localisation thing as Ranger's numbers show. MS wouldn't need a massive number of boxes to satisfy those markets, at least to make a token launch and get the ball rolling, while the localisation is essential to present a good first impression. But I wouldn't back that opinion with any great conviction!
I'm not buying that argument, at all. There are lots speech recognition solutions that work fine when people speak english with dutch, danish or norwegian accents.
English with a dutch accent is a lot closer to the Queen's English than Scottish, Geordie or Scouse english.
Cheers
MS at E3 was sure to release XBO in 21 counties (which is 11 counties less than PS4 anyway) then realized, few weeks later, that they could not release in those 8 countries because localization is taking more time.
This scenario suggests that MS is very, very unprepared and is really planning as it goes.
The alternative is that MS purposely decided to delay XBO in those countries because are not key/vital countries for them and so a delay is "acceptable"
This scenarios shows that MS indeed knows what it's doing but surely is not what customers wants nor puts them in a good light.
Now I personally don't see what's positive about either scenarios.
Either way MS loose something.
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Depends on your slant I guess. I was thinking along with Rangers & Shifty. First impressions are a major thing. So localization seems the most plausible to me. But then again you are right. They can't have a major launch like this & not have some supply issues with at least 1 component. Shifty is right. It could go either way.
Tommy McClain
http://metro.co.uk/2013/08/28/sony-...way-stuff-on-day-one-its-kind-of-odd-3939866/
It's kind of an interesting approach, focusing on third-party exclusive content and marketing for new IPs instead of established ones like MS. How will it payoff in the long run if those new titles aren't as successful as previous franchises.
How long will the COD, Halo, and AC audience stick with these brands going into a new console generation? Those audiences, especially the COD audience, seem almost willingly isolated from trying or experimenting with different games that might capture their interest more than they realize.
Hopefully with an increasing focus on sharing gameplay experiences, those same gamers might open-up to other games and send a little money in other developers' direction.
It's kind of an interesting approach, focusing on third-party exclusive content and marketing for new IPs instead of established ones like MS. How will it payoff in the long run if those new titles aren't as successful as previous franchises.
How long will the COD, Halo, and AC audience stick with these brands going into a new console generation? Those audiences, especially the COD audience, seem almost willingly isolated from trying or experimenting with different games that might capture their interest more than they realize.
Hopefully with an increasing focus on sharing gameplay experiences, those same gamers might open-up to other games and send a little money in other developers' direction.
I don't have any particular information to call upon to consider this from a scientific perspective. However, the quality of international English varies greatly based on meeting foreigners; it'll depend how much they use English and the quality of English used by their peers. Unless nigh everyone in the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway speak fluent English without a regional slant, speech recognition is going to be compromised for some people. There are enough crude parodies of English spoken with Scandinavian and Dutch accents to prove that there are regional variations. And what MS are trying to do with Kinect may be pushing the boundaries more than other solutions (of which little experience I've had have been decidedly imperfect interpreting my clear Surrey English, so I have little faith that understanding the gamut of international English flavours is a solved problem).
That may be so, and it may be easier for MS to create voice recognition for Dutch and Norwegian English than for Scottish and Geordie, but there's no way they can release in Britain with English that doesn't work for half the geographical populace! So the engineers working on speech will have to first and foremost secure the official English speaking dialects before working on the international variations. Which leads back to the first point above - if everyone who speaks English in the tier-2 countries does so with an accent close enough to Queen's English that MS can support it without any additional effort, MS can release there. But if there's enough difference among enough to the people to harm the experience, it's probably best to wait and get the product working properly.
If you can present evidence that English is that well refined in those territories, you can sway me.
Or they just don't have enough units to satisfy their core markets as they measure them. Localisation issues are just an easy fall back cover story, one with which they are familiar.
That is a third scenario...and still it would mean that MS is unprepared.
Possibly, but why bother at all with a cover story?
Localisation is bound to be tricky when a big selling point is the new NUI.
We've heard plenty of that, yet it in the end it all amounts to nothing. They'll launch within a week or two of Sony. It looks to me like they'll have plenty of units (by launch standards), there are still day one preorders available at least in the USA, vs none for PS4 that I know of.
It reminds of the former "there are no real Xbox's MS is hiding something those sneaky bastards all e3 games were running on PC"
Now that the other guy seems to be having more trouble in that dept funny it all evaporated.
I really dont think the markets they dropped for a couple months are very important.
I could be wrong, but I don't believe we've seen a retail version of either console... (the quirk is that the XB1 devkit is almost indistinguishable from a retail console from the outside - just an extra port I think?)
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
I think MS is as prepared as any console manufacturer ever is at launch. Shit happens.
Yeah thats a great ideal. Thats like selling a spanish only enabled Xbox in the southwest part of the USA while delaying the english based version.
I can imagine a best buy associate explaining how to use the Xbox one while saying, "Xbox prendido" with an english accent and the Xbox going "Por favor, rodar su r de". MS launching a marketing campaign on Telemundo and other spanish TV networks.
Those english speakers could simply be serviced by importing an Xbox One. Unless your primary audience is english speakers in those countries there is nothing ideal about launching a product in such a manner.
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