When it comes to Microsoft and the Japanese gaming market, it is no secret, the two haven’t been the coziest of friends. The contentious relationship between the Japanese gaming audience and Microsoft’s gaming console offering could probably be best described as frenemies with few benefits.
However, traditionally adversarial relationship between the Japan’s console buying audience and the Xbox hasn’t deterred Microsoft’s efforts to court a better future potential for the two.
In a recent interview with DualShockers at the 2018 Gamescom convention, Xbox Games Marketing General Manager Aaron Greenburg addressed the desire of the division to grow its Japanese content, in an apparent effort to amend a fruitful and necessary relationship with the regions audience.
“We love Japan. Phil goes there every year and in many cases multiple times a year. If you looked at our E3 briefing we had the most Japanese content we’ve ever shown in our briefing ever.
I think that is speaking to the partnerships and relationships we’ve built. Right behind you, we have hands-on Kingdom Hearts III from our partners at Square Enix here at Gamescom. That’s a franchise that we know is love and being able to announce a world premiere of something like Jump Force from our partners at Bandai Namco, it’s great.
I think our commitment and our support from Japanese developers has never been stronger, and we wanna help them succeed on the global stage, and that continues to be our focus. We know our fans want those great Japanese games. That’s why even some of the games we got later, we made sure that we showed them at E3, we made sure we highlighted them so you know they matter to our fans.
Again, we always take that lens of putting our fans first as we think about content, and we know Japanese content is important and that’s why you see us grow our content. and we’ll continue to focus on that.”
While compliments can go a long way, it’ll be Microsoft’s commitment to dev support and promotions that’ll help it climb the massive cultural divide in eastern and western gaming dynamics.
Hopefully, Microsoft’s Xbox division is employing personnel with a proper mindset for Japanese gaming culture, and has the courage to prioritize their findings over traditional cookie cutter western stories and gameplay.
Further reading: gamescom 2018, Gaming, Microsoft, Xbox
