Previously, we showed you pictures of the less-than-enthusiastic launch the Xbox One received in the land of the Rising Sun. Since then, well, let’s just say it’s a really bad time to be selling Microsoft’s Xbox in Japan.
How bad? According to Kotaku, the Xbox One sold 1,314 units in Japan last week. Even though Japan is in the middle of a massive hardware sales slump, that’s still, well, really bad. Like “Getting waxed like a bikini model by the Wii U” bad.
The problem is threefold. One is historical; the Xbox has just never done well in Japan for a wide variety of reasons technical, cultural, and otherwise. The second is, well, they’re not marketing any games that the Japanese gamer wants to play. It’s easy to forget, with the Western dominance of sales cycles, that Japan has a very different gaming industry and a very different type of gamer; compare the popularity of Yokai Watch over there to how it sells over here.
The third is that everybody’s getting pantsed by mobile right now in Japan. It’s just that, apparently, as mobile developers are going around and yanking down trousers, some people get a bonus wedgie.