On Sunday, journalist Jeff Grubb hosted Phil Spencer and Matt Booty on Giant Bomb’s ‘Giant Bomb at Nite’ stream (spotted by TweakTown).

During the conversation, Giant Bomb’s Lucy James asked Spencer and Booty how they were feeling about Xbox’s ongoing expansion into the Japanese market.

“We’re not the strongest brand in Japan when you think about Sony, Nintendo, Switch, PlayStation, mobile frankly and the role that it plays for a lot of the players and creators there…” Spencer began.

Though Xbox doesn’t have near the presence of its competitors in Japan, Spencer explains that the company is actively building relationships with Japanese developers.

This is plain to see from the Xbox Games Showcase where Atlus announced three new games - Persona 3 Reload, Persona 5 Tactica and Metaphor: ReFantazio and Capcom announced a new game of its own, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess.



According to Spencer, Xbox has a great relationship with FromSoftware and is building relationships with Sega, Atlus, Bandai Namco and Capcom. Square Enix remains a tough nut to crack, however.

Grubb then delved further into the topic, asking what the rationale is for these Japanese developers to not bring a game to Xbox.

“There’s not one thing. Sometimes there are business deals that are done, sometimes a team has a focus where they can only support two or three platforms and they’re reducing development risk,” Spencer explained.

“Sometimes the team just doesn’t have a lot of connection to Xbox and they don’t necessarily see it in their local game store when they walk in. It’s why our presence on the ground [matters], even if we’re not selling as many consoles as the competition… if you go to Yodobashi Camera [Japanese electronic chain], I want there to be an Xbox section, I want there to be games that are shown,” he continued.

“I also want the teams to be on a kind of base level, to know that Xbox is a games platform and it’s something they see in their daily lives. I love the progress that we’ve made over the last 5 or 6 years there, but there’s obviously more work for us to do,” Spencer concluded.

Xbox is a growing brand in Japan but is still nowhere near as big as PlayStation and Nintendo in the Japanese hardware market. There was one week in June during which the Xbox outsold the PlayStation, but that appears to be a rare occurrence.

Posted: Jun 18, 2023 6:12 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/xbox-struggling-attract-japanese-developers/