Something About Japan: why Xbox One could be Microsoft’s final strike

May 26th, 2013, 01:30 Posted By: wraggster

Microsoft snubbed Japan with its handling of the Xbox One reveal this week, and the next-gen console shows little sign of reversing Microsoft’s fortunes in Japan.We all know that the Xbox and 360 have struggled to gain a foothold in Japan, a market that comprises around 10 per cent of global videogame sales. The 360 consistently comes last in the weekly hardware charts, with just 349 sales last week, and to date has sold a meagre 1.7 million units in Japan – a country with a population of 127.5 million. Microsoft’s booth at Tokyo Game Show got smaller and smaller until last year, when Xbox simply didn’t bother showing up. Still, it has its fans here. Let’s take a look at how Tuesday’s announcement went down.The name Xbox One was quickly derided by Japanese gamers. The English word “one” is pronounced “wan” in Japan, which is the same as the noise a dog makes. So a canine is known as a “wan-wan” or a “wan-chan” – cue a barrage of Japanese-language tweets stuffed with emoticons of cute little puppies.But a worse nickname quickly stuck. As Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games tweeted, “In Japan it is abbreviated to X1 or batsu-ichi which is slang for someone who has got divorced and kind of means failure #seriousfail”.Indeed, X is used just like in English to denote a mistake, and so “X1” or “batsu-ichi” can literally be translated as “strike one”. As a commenter on online otaku gossip hole 2channel pointed out, “Xbox has already had two strikes in Japan”.Although the the used-game and DRM issues have not ignited debate in Japan in quite the way they have in the West, the One’s mandatory internet connection was unsurprisingly labelled as a “nuisance” by Japanese commenters.In many ways the One is the most America-centric Xbox to date: Many of the new features, such as the heavy focus on watching cable TV, seem a non-starter even in Europe, let alone Japan, and Microsoft has already said that the service will be US-only at launch.

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