
Man kann Microsoft absolut nicht vorwerfen, dass sie sich nicht um den japanischen Markt bemüht haben. Schon zu Zeiten der Xbox 360 haben sie versucht, unter anderem mit exklusiven JRPGs wie Lost Odyssey oder Blue Dragon den Geschmack der Japaner zu treffen und sie so zum Kauf der Konsole zu verleiten. Doch ein Blick auf die von der Famitsu veröffentlichten Hardware-Verkaufszahlen der letzten Woche ist mehr als eindeutig. Demnach wurden 180.136 Switch verkauft, 8.094 PlayStation 4, und nur 80 Xbox One. Doch Microsoft kann auch Erfolge in Japan verbuchen - mit einem Switch-Spiel.
Das dort von den Microsoft Game Studios vertriebene Minecraft konnte sich seit der Veröffentlichung am 21. Juni 2018 1.003.160 Mal verkaufen. Diese Zahl bezieht sich dabei nur auf die Handelsversion, Downloads im eShop sind nicht eingerechnet. Damit würde die Zahl noch einmal um 470.165 Exemplare steigen.
Darüber hinaus ist Minecraft somit auch der erste Third Party-Titel, der in Japan über eine Million verkaufte Handels-Versionen erreicht hat.
Bisher gibt es einen Kommentar
The translator explained: Mikami had confirmed what Microsoft had heard, that he was frustrated developing for PlayStation 2, which was tough to work with. But his team's bonuses were tied to game sales. He needed a reason, a way to explain the shift away from the wildly successful PlayStation 2, the dominant platform of the time, to the Xbox, which had yet to launch, and which in most Japanese eyes was doomed to failure. “What do you guys have to offer?” he asked, bluntly.
Eventually an exasperated Mikami boiled it down: 'what is your philosophy? Sony says games are entertainment, something larger, fuelled by the Emotion Engine. Nintendo says games are toys, created by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, perhaps the greatest game developer of all time. What do you feel?' Microsoft had no answer.
“I almost jumped out the window because we had said repeatedly over and over and over that we aspire to enable games that could be considered to be art, much like film,” Bachus says, “that because of the maturity of the development tools and the APIs and the power of the technology, game developers on Xbox would be able to concentrate on the finesse features that elevated games to being something more than they were otherwise.
“So the guy who reported to me said, 'oh that's so great! I wish that I had known that.' But unfortunately it was too late.”
Bachus flagged down Pat Ohura, the head of Xbox Japan at the time, and told him to jump on the next train to Osaka to salvage the deal. But he was too late. Mikami had already met with Nintendo and pledged Resident Evil to its consoles. “That's why Resident Evil 4 was a Nintendo exclusive and it took a while for it to come to Xbox. That was very frustrating.”
Falls sich jemand dafür interessiert, EuroGamer hatte dazu vor über sieben Jahren einen interessanten Artikel: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ailed-in-japan