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The rise of Xbox worries me because of how they treat Japanese games – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

A reader worries if that Xbox becomes the dominant force in the games industry it will spell bad news for Japanese video game developers.

Xbox and Japan has never really mixed (Picture: Microsoft)

A reader worries if that Xbox becomes the dominant force in the games industry it will spell bad news for Japanese video game developers.

Considering they’re the richest company in the world, and the Xbox is over 20 years old, Microsoft really don’t seem to be very good at being a games publisher. All their consoles have been easily outsold by Sony and Nintendo and despite having a decent crop of first party titles and exclusives in the Xbox 360 period they’ve had virtually nothing of any note since, at least as far as casual gamers are concerned.

A few months ago, it genuinely felt like they were going to jack it all in and I think to a degree they are. When their next console fails, like all the others have, I imagine they’ll stop bothering with hardware entirely, or at least just make it a minor side business.

However, they now own Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, two of the biggest multiformat publishers around, so they are now automatically one of the most important games companies in the world. We’ve seen that this week, with the news that Microsoft, through no special effort, has more games in the PlayStation top 20 than Sony does.

This is going to encourage them to make all their games multiformat, including Bethesda games, and that’s theoretically good for PlayStation 5 owners. But it also means a single company – a giant $3 trillion multinational that is infamous for being a bully and spending its way to success – now has a death grip on the games industry.

Their hardware may be all but irrelevant but once streaming become practical Microsoft will have an instant and unassailable advantage, and then it’s goodbye competition in gaming.

You could argue that what does it matter whose name is on the box, as long as the games are the same? Well, what bothers me about is Xbox is how the whole business is set up to circumvent and downplay Japanese games and companies.

Infamously, the codename for the first Xbox was Midway, as in the Battle of Midway where the US defeated Japan in WW2, which is a big yikes moment right off the bat. At that point all console manufacturers were Japanese – Nintendo, Sega, and Sony – and Microsoft immediately did all it could to start undermining them and their developers.

Apart from a very brief moment at the beginning of the Xbox 360 generation, they barely ever engaged with Japanese developers to make first party games and the Xbox has never sold well in Japan. They quickly realised that they couldn’t compete with Sony directly and so they tried a typical business move: if you can’t beat ‘em, make them irrelevant.

The Xbox 360 era was all about Western style games, with most Japanese companies struggling to adapt, only making a comeback in the PlayStation 4 era when they went back to doing their own thing. Everything Microsoft does, and every success it has, is designed around doing without Japanese companies and that really worries me.

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