TOKYO—Of all the Tokyo Game Show attendees who visited the Kinect booth, one salaryman in a button-down shirt stood out. He jumped into the Dance Central game with gusto, busting out crazy moves in his patent-leather shoes, literally going leaps and bounds beyond what the dance game required.
A small crowd gathered to watch his moves. At one point, he did a handstand in front of the Xbox 360 camera controller. He was making Kinect look like barrels of fun.
But did the man, who gave his name as Yoshida, plan to buy the upcoming game and do “The Humpty Dance” at home?
“No,” Yoshida said. “I don’t have an Xbox. There are no games I want for it.”
A few months from now, Microsoft will celebrate its 10th anniversary of not being able to sell many videogames in Japan. The company is enjoying record-high sales in the United States and Europe with its redesigned Xbox 360 and the Kinect motion controller. But it remains locked in a struggle to make its console appealing to one of the world’s biggest markets for gaming.
Aside from an Xbox 360 roster filled with the kind of shooting games that historically don’t do so well in Japan, the biggest thing holding back Kinect might be a simple issue of real estate: The unique sensor, which lets players use their bodies to control the on-screen action, requires a lot of physical space to operate—and that’s something a lot of Japanese people just don’t have.
A history of failure
Microsoft has had no luck in Japan since it launched the original Xbox there in February 2002. It was the exact opposite of what the country wanted out of a game machine—a giant, noisy, power-sucking box with a massive controller and nothing but Western games, like first-person shooters, that were unpopular with gamers here. The marketing, the design, the content—everything was out of whack with what Japan wanted.
On paper, few of those things apply to the Xbox 360, which is probably why it has sold three times as much as the first Xbox. But even these sales numbers are relatively tiny. Since its launch in 2005, the Xbox 360 has only sold a pitiful 1.5 million units in Japan compared to PlayStation 3’s 6.7 million and Wii’s 11 million. In fact, sales of the console in Japan linger barely above those of the ancient PlayStation 2.
The Kinect doesn’t seem to be helping the problem. The controller, with its camera and microphone sensors, “doesn’t fit with Japanese culture,” a player named Takizawa told Wired.com at the Microsoft booth. He thought Michael Jackson: The Experience looked like a lot of fun, but questioned whether he’d have room to play it in his typically small living space.
Another gamer named Takumi, who is a student at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, said he could probably get a Kinect into his place, although his friend Akira said “no way.” Both of them are PlayStation 3 owners, but neither owns an Xbox. “It’s too expensive,” said Takumi. A Kinect alone costs ¥15,000.
The ironic thing about Microsoft’s struggles to sell Kinect to an apathetic Japanese audience is that the company says Japan’s gamemakers are coming up with the best concepts for the motion controller.
Two of the Microsoft-funded games are on display at the booth: Masaya Matsuura, the popular creator of the megahit PlayStation game Parappa the Rapper, is making a first-person haunted-house adventure. Suda 51, creator of ultraviolent action games like Shadows of the Damned, is contributing Demonic Pitch, in which you play a baseball player that fights monsters with his killer fastballs.
These are clever, original games from talented designers. But Microsoft has been down this road before, commissioning the original creators of Japan’s popular RPGs to make Xbox-exclusive games. The strategy didn’t work. Eventually the company successfully lobbied Square Enix to release Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360, as well as PlayStation 3. The incredibly popular series barely moved the needle.
Sometimes it seems like it doesn’t matter what Microsoft creates—Japan’s gamers just aren’t that into Xbox games.
Haunt, created by Tokyo developer Nana-On-Sha, is a spooky game set in a haunted house
Richard Newman, head of Microsoft's game-development studios in Japan, spearheaded the move to get well-known Japanese designers making Kinect games.
"Kinect is an interesting paradigm to design for," Newman said at an event Wednesday at which Demonic Pitch was introduced. "When you break away from the controller, there are a lot of conventions that get broken. A lot of the early itches that we got were controller games adapted to Kinect. What we really wanted was for creators to think outside the box."
The pitches that Microsoft Game Studios got from Japanese designers, Newman said, were some of the most unique and unexpected. They looked at several prototypes and tried to pick the "craziest" ones.
"These are core games for core gamers," Newman said.
Masaya Matsuura's Haunt was one of the chosen few. It's a first-person game that attempts to replicate the feeling of being spooked by a haunted house at an amusement park. Wired.com tried the game in developer Nana-On-Sha's Tokyo office, in a small room that, if you push all the furniture out of the way, is just barely big enough to play Kinect games.
"Haunt is not a game that requires a big space," Matsuura said; players don't have to move their bodies in extreme ways. But, he added, when he wants to watch an employee play the game, he has to lie down prone in the room to avoid accidentally being picked up by the Kinect sensor.
It's probably no coincidence, then, that even the Japanese gamemakers are aiming their products at the global audience. Nana-On-Sha's Matsuura thinks that working alongside Japanese creators is important if Microsoft wants to make the Xbox 360 more of a success in the territory.
But, he says, "the biggest market for the Xbox is the US, so we have to concentrate on the English-speaking territories." Haunt was built in English and translated into Japanese later.
So even if their countrymen don't want the Kinect, the hands-free controller is becoming so popular in the United States and Europe that the games might still sell. Just not here.
Microsoft's Newman believes that the Kinect, simply by virtue of being a brand-new method of controlling games, could help game creators express truly new ideas.
"The aspirations of the creators were greater than Kinect," he said. "They were ready to break free from some of the constraints they were feeling in the industry. Some ideas were nothing short of philosophical about where they wanted to take things."
Wired.com did speak to one Kinect owner at the Microsoft booth. She was standing with her friends watching Dance Central 2.
"It's fun," she said, "but I hardly use it. I barely have enough room. My back is against the wall."
Did she play any regular games? The kind that use a controller?
"Yes," she said, struggling to remember the name of the game she owned. "What's it called... what's it called... Ha... Halo."
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