Honestly I think it will take a generation of Activision/Blizzard/Bethesda games being Xbox favorable (as in, being exclusive or in some way better on Xbox) for them to take any market share away from Sony. But, I also believe that Sony is currently in a position where Xbox could hit all home runs, have a plethora of AAA exclusives, the better hardware, and have multiplatform games be better in every way but Sony still maintains a mind share much like Nintendo does today... If you want to play those Sony first party games, you still need that Playstation.
All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2023 Edition]
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Inuhanyou
Veteran
Well that's only if Sony stays the course. It seems they are taking away from their bread and butter single player efforts with risky bet on games as a service. Which may trip them up very bad if it doesn't land. We shall see.
Xbox Series X|S Sales Pass Original Xbox Sales In Japan
The Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft’s latest generation of gaming consoles, has achieved a remarkable milestone in Japan. Famitsu says the cumulative sales of the Xbox Series X|S consoles have surpassed
t.co
I guess its now off to beat the 360. That might be a long time as the 360 sold 1.6m over its run.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
If Microsoft want more mind share, they need to make an effort to reach more minds. Xbox sell in and support less than half the number of countries that PlayStation do.
The countries supported by PlayStation but not Xbox is Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Georgia, Guatamala, Honduras, Iceland, Indonesia, Kuwait, Latvia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Thailand, Tunisia, and Ukraine.
How is it PlayStation can actively support Ukraine, but Microsoft cannot sell to affluent European countries? Why are the absent from most of the Middle East? Or most of Asia, one of the biggest territories for gaming? It's baffling.
Given poor sales of OXB in Japan, that's not that remarkable. 360 did okay but AFAIK XBS isn't anything like on trajectory to impact there. Perhaps an XBSM could do it?
Indeed, that article is fairly whack. It says "The Xbox 360 and Xbox One also struggled to gain traction in Japan" and then XBS "seems to be doing better" but the data says otherwise. XBS isn't selling better than 360, and 360 did not struggle like XBO. XBO failed outright, OXB struggled to gain traction, 360 sold fairly well. This graph from May; I've extended an approximation of where XBS is now.
Comparing other platforms, 'good' sales in Japan might be 5 million, maybe a bit less. Megadrive was 3.6 Million - that was a healthy Japanese console? N64, 5.5M. Saturn 5.8M. Truly great sales are at 15+ million. If MS want to 'succeed' in Japan, they'd need something selling 5 million. They'd probably prefer to have GP on NSW!
Inuhanyou
Veteran
This is what I have been saying for a while. and then they claim they need whole ass pubs to "compete". try actually selling to the rest of Europe for a start instead of just being UK centric
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
I have say that I love the theory that MS is struggling in EU because they aren't selling Xbox in Albania. The key to Sony's success. Lol.
Microsoft are too lazy to work that hard. Its much easier to spend the profits from their other monopolies by buying up 3rd party publishers full of previously multi-format IP that they can now lock away behind their Gamepass paywall and rent out to people. All the while this is happening they can focus on squeezing Sony out of the US market by buying up valuable 3rd party games and keeping them off Playstation.
Then they can move forward with their end game which is to do away with selling licenses to their games in the form of digital purchases and prepare the industry and gamers for a time where the only way people will be able to "consume MS/Xbox content" is through a monthly subscription. Then they can start to raise prices on their subscriptions.
Its happening with Windows also, the next version of Windows is likely to push a cloudboot option where you pay a subscription to use Windows in the cloud. That way you won't actually own any software, but instead rent it from MS. The the concept of "owning a computer" will be dead.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Sure derile Albania for whatever reason, cool. Why did you ignore Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Iceland, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia? That's a collective market of 42m people.
The whole list of countries I set out - 1.1b people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Not sure how it's in all of those countries, but at least in Estonia you can buy Series X from many retailers, perhaps it doesn't have an official importer over there, but you can purchase it at a normal price from a lot of places and I assume that to be the case for many of those European countries. The very least you can buy it online like Amazon for certain. I'm not disagreeing that MS's effort is less than what the competition does in Europe in general, but it would take a lot to make real progress with their hardware over here.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
I guess that's what happens when your a trillion dollar company. You fail upwards by shoving capital at things until something sticks. It's not by being smart or particularly clever at business which is a shame. But it seems like a pretty universal rule
Seems easy, dont be clever and dont work hard + bad at business. Trillion dollar company guaranteed.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
In most cases it's due to localization of the interface (for both consumer as well as official MS support channels) to the country's native (versus recognized) language and/or dialect. In the remaining cases it may be due to them determining cost/benefit of getting all appropriate government approvals in order to officially sell and support the console in that country.
So there's no "official" support, but the consoles are easily purchased in most if not all of those regions.
Of course who knows why Siovak (Slovakia) has native language support but Siovene (Slovenia) doesn't. I'm not party to which languages and dialects get chosen for official support. /shrug.
Regards,
SB
I don't know what exactly means supported in that list. I live in Luxembourg and both XBox games and consoles are easily available at the same price as the rest of Europe. If it means that there is no specific Luxemborg store I don't see how this is of any consequences : people from Luxembourg will just log in on the French or on the German ones, depending from their preferences. Luxembourg doesn't even has its Amazon, even if the European head office of Amazon are in Luxembourg
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
These aren't big console markets. One of my best friends is from Albania, but he would agree that this is a silly argument. For those of you who are sticking up for the little guy in Latvia against the evil MS, your virtue signaling is dully noted.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
You assume incorrectly and the difference between a product like a console being supported in a given country includes fundamental things like getting it fixed if it goes wrong, having support for your own language and being able to use your local currency.
Would people in the US be as keen to buy a PlayStaton if when it broke you needed to ship it to Canada at your expense to get it fixed, assuming Sony recognised your purchase/warranty, if the console didn't work in your native language and you could not buy games in US dollars, only a foreign currency for which they may be a massively unfavourable exchange rate?
Somehow, I doubt it.
They are comparing the sales with other MS machines. Now the xbox series is the second most popular xbox machine in japan ever. We don't know what the future brings in terms of titles and sales, it could although unlikely pass the 360. This is also at a time while traditional consoles are struggling in japan.
I note that you don't even bring up playstation but the ps4 sold less than 10m units as of March 2023 in japan so even the ps4 isn't truely great sales according to you ? The ps3 didn't even break 11m units.
Why would I? The article was comparing XBS to previous XBs and making statements. I challenged those statements.
Yep. Going by that definition of 'great', PS4 did not sell great. Only PS and PS2 sold great in Japan. It depends where one draws the line for a subjective definition. My suggestion is 5 million (maybe less, like 3 million) and up is a 'healthy' installation base that'll attract natural interest from Japanese developers and the public, and 15+ is doing great and getting all the interest. Below that bottom threshold somewhere is a 'we don't care number'. I don't know what the divisions would be, and of course they aren't hard lines, but if we are going to talk about XB succeeding in Japan, we need a definition of what a 'successful' console is, no? So I went to historical numbers of devices.
Feel free to make a good argument for a target number MS should be targeting to achieve 'success in Japan'. My commentary was only on the article's claims which, surely you agree, are nonsensical - how can XBS being doing better than XB360 when it's selling much slower??
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