Why isn't XB360 outselling PS3 in Europe? *spawn

I'm not American, but I've lived in various states here for many years now. I can say two things very concretely. First that vacationing here and living here are two totally different things, vacations will not really give you an idea of what a city is really about. Second is that I'd argue it's impossible to generalize the USA. Every state I've lived in has been different, Texas was very different from Washington which was very different from California. It's more like different worlds here each living side by side. Like the patriotism you mention, I tend to see more the other way around in LA where they criticize more than worship the USA. Unless you are in Orange County where it's the other way around. In Seattle it really depended where you lived, the "west side" or Seattle area was far different from the "east side" or Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland area. In Austin it also depended where you lived, extremely liberal people in the city but venture outside a bit and it's a different world. Orange county here in LA is very different from LA County, etc. Note I used to think the same about the USA before I ever lived here, I had all the typical stereotypes. Having lived here now for 17 years I can clearly say I was completely wrong. Now when I visit back home and hear family talk about the USA I cringe at how wrong they are, but I used to be that same way.

 

I´ve lived in California for 6 months. I know the difference between LA and Orange County, it´s fascinating. As is comparing California to other states.

Anyway, if the "Buy American" phenomenon was totally negligable, the presidential candidates wouldn´t bother, they may be stupid, but their advisers are not.

 

Sorry, did you mean me?

If so: I didn't say that - you must have meant someone else. Brand can be really powerful, especially in the absence of other (real*) distinguishing factors or in the presence of customer ignorance.

*philosophical / metaphysical arguments notwithstanding

 

Don't know if it's negligible, but it doesn't seem any different than any other country. In fact I'd argue that Canadians are more nationalist than Americans from what I've seen. Even just watching the local news there was like "A Canadian created a new device in a Canadian lab using Canadian materials to appeal to Canadians which will be used on the space shuttle with the Canadian robotic arm to encourage Canadians in Canadian schools to join the Canadian space program". Yeah I did see more Americans cars in Austin, but in Seattle it seemed like every second car was a Subaru, whereas here in LA you'd think the only cars sold were Bmw's, Mercedez and Bentley Continental GT's. I don't know if Europe is any different than USA for nationalism really either, at least not shown by our family/relatives.

In any case there was a post made earlier showing the Xbox/360's progress in Europe compared to PS2/PS3 which to me all but seemed to show that even if there is some anti american bias it's probably negligible when it comes to buying video game consoles, and that the 360 actually did pretty darned good in Europe. If you factor in that the console self distructed then I'd say it did amazingly well!

 

I'm sorry. I was referring to my talk with fearsomepirate. but you both start with an f!

 

Considering this is the second generation MS product in the marketplace you can't really knock it for just how well it has done.

The Sony brand and Playstation in particular were synonymous with gaming. Sony were there right at the beginning of the console 3D revolution when it was all about games. And they ruled the roost absolutely.

The internet had barely even started when the PS1 was around, now we are immersed everyday from our TVs to our mobile phones. And the whole thing isn't just about gaming any more. It's about media delivery and advertising content and who controls the chain.

The next generation might be completely different. The Xbox brand is known, it's had better PR than the PS3 and is slightly ahead in the content framework. Sony have a fight and they might just pull it off but I don't think we will see the same sales patterns again.

 

Here in Finland people are using the word "pleikkari" (a slang word for Playstation) as a synonym for "console". It's hard to fight against that

From my point of view the couple largest issues with XBox are:
-Lack of localization. This affects other Microsoft products too, like Windows Phone and Bing. We don't have Zune Pass or anything like that. Also, it's hard to find XBox games translated in Finnish. Sony (and even Google) are better at this, offering localized services for Finnish users.

-Lack of interesting bundles. Microsoft had a killer bundle couple years back which included Kungfu Panda and Lego Indiana Jones. I'm sure that package sold really well at Christmas time. Apart from that bundle, the others have been lacking.

 

That may be true, but I think compared to Europe, Americans are a lot more nationalist in that sense. The reason I think is kind of logical: The US is a big country and has a big production - everything from software to cars and consoles. We Europeans are not used to this, except maybe for Germany, France, England where cars are concerned. Pretty much everything else is either from the US or Japan (electronics), so it's hard to be nationalistic towards these products. I think it's also because Europe is split in many countries, so idealogies differ a bit.

 

Europe had production of CE devices from the 40s onwards, but from the 80s/90s onwards they prefered to buy Japanese (presumably because Japanese made stuff was better). We had a GEC VCR as our first. I don't think GEC exist any more. All the European CE manufacturing has pretty much died AFAIK (are their still Eastern European cold-war leftovers?). We make white goods, but nothing electronic like personal computers or TVs. So there can be zero nationalism when it comes to buying products that Europe doesn't make! And we won't buy poop either - hence the death of our own CE industries because imports were better. British manufacturing became a joke. I guess to cut costs manufacturing was compromised. You don't have that problem with Chinese imports as costs and ammortised by cheap human labour.

 

^
Phillips is Dutch.

 

I don't think his point was that ALL European companies have retreated from home CE devices, just that the vast majority of them have. My Grandmother used to have a GEC TV, my friend's family used to have a Baird (yep, you guessed it), and it goes on. Where are Siemens in the CE space? Where are Amstrad, Alba, Bush, Matsui - some still operating but with very limited market share? My parents used to have a fantastic EMI record player, where did that go?

His point was that 30 years ago there were a lot of European CE manufacturers, but now there are barely any at all. In the mid 80s, everyone in the UK at least started to buy Sony, Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Toshiba, Hitachi, Pioneer, Akai, etc.

 

Yep. CE jsut fizzled out here. It seemed Europe was content to import all that. Hence there's no possibility of nationalism really affecting the console market. (Actually, one caveat, I think some people from Portugal bought Under Siege as the only game from the only Portugese developer! It can give a little boost to smaller companies, but isn't going to sway to the whole landscape to any degree.)

 

4GB Kinect for £175 and 250GB Kinect for £250 in local supermarket (quite a bit cheaper than Amazon atm).

So ... not really feeling the big Kinect push in the UK. Yet.

... it's not coming, is it?

 

Due is the wrong word. help, is IMO more fitting. I wouldn't be suprised if Xbox being a native console is more of an advantage in its local market than it is a disadvantage here in Europe. There's a lot of anti Microsoft, sometimes even Americanism (due to political reasons) overhere.

There may be not many, but one of todays biggest and most powerful (CE) brand is from the US: Apple with the iPod, iPad and of course the iPhone. Its success may not be due to its heritage, but having a such successful (native) brand may help to build a nationalistic buying behaviour over time. The car industry is somewhat related too and probably helps this too.

Adding to that, I think the Xbox is quite clearly more an american console by design (e.g. case design, xmb, etc) than its competitors. Europeans in general may not mind as much as the Japanese though, even if the content on the console is the more important factor.

 

Although it's quite possible that no-one is particularly buying XB because it is American, I think the American cultural impact was important, especially for XB1. It was a stereotypically American product - big and fast and brash - and that goes down well over there, so XB inherited a culture that made it do well in its own territory. That's to be expected; the Japanese build products that fit their culture (smaller, including smaller controllers) which adds appeal in their native territories. Where Europe is different is we are importing from two different cultures, so the one that can reach out to us gets the sales. And in that respect we have more affinity for the Eastern style than the American style I think. Big and brash doesn't normally do well here. Classy does (although the UK can be more accomodating of brash, especially Yoof Culture with significant American influences!). Hence MS adjusted XB360 considerably to make more rounded.