The Xbox business today is pretty unrecognizable from that of 20 years past, which on this week all that time ago was launching the Xbox 360. There’s all the changes to the business, a different suite of executives at the top, and an entirely different first-party portfolio, of course – but when I think of the changes, one absence comes to the forefront of my mind: Japan.
It’s difficult to know what the folks at Xbox were thinking 20 years ago. Did they know that they were about to break the deadlock that had been immovable in the PS2 and original Xbox era? Did they know the success that was coming, even in the face of hardware that’d begin to melt and error out on an industrial scale? The execs of the time would, I imagine, now say that they didn’t know but they could sense they had something special. That old chestnut.
They would say that, of course. But there are things that one could argue show that was definitely their thinking at the time – and one example that sticks out in my mind is Xbox’s aggressive commitment to Japan at this time.
The original Xbox was hardly a storming success in Japan, but despite that, Microsoft went big in the region with its follow-up. In this period, you had an aggressive Xbox making moves in the region. Developers were courted as they always are, but it’s crucial that in this time period much of that courting came to consummation. Deals were inked, with Xbox ultimately signing a tranche of high-profile exclusives or timed exclusives for fans of Japanese games both in the homeland and abroad, and where true exclusive deals failed to materialise Xbox was able to successfully leverage the 360’s head start over PS3 to secure optically valuable ‘defacto’ exclusives.
Square Enix was approached, for instance, and while it took a while to cough up Final Fantasy it nevertheless spun up a suite of Xbox exclusives – Star Ocean 4, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant. While Final Fantasy remained out of reach, Xbox also courted the franchise’s father, now divorced from Square, resulting in Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon – still two of Xbox’s most unique exclusives.
A little company called FromSoftware, which had already fully supported the original Xbox with games like Otogi, signed up with the likes of Chromehounds and Enchanted Arms. Namco proffered Tales of Vesperia, the criminally underrated Eternal Sonata, and the earth-shakingly good Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. The list goes on. Perhaps most consequential was Capcom, with that particular publisher offering up tentpole promotional exclusives like Dead Rising and Lost Planet, plus the promise of true multiplatform day-and-date releases in franchises like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Street Fighter.
There were the one million troops of Ninety-Nine Nights. Tecmo Koei had Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. Oh, and Konami offered up Bomberman: Act Zero. That one sure made up for the lack of MGS4, yeah.
It goes beyond those big names, though. With its PC-like development environment and a clearly thriving Japanese development relations department, the 360 also quietly became a default platform for stranger, more niche Japanese offerings that for a long time had largely been banished to PC. Xbox 360 became the non-arcade home of shump bullet hell titles, for instance, with the genre-dominating Japanese dev Cave ultimately putting over fifteen titles on 360 including the likes of Deathsmiles and DoDonPachi. In the same period of time, Cave only committed a single shmup to PlayStation 3.
It wasn’t just shooters, either. There were occasional trashy-but-exclusive action titles from developers like Cavia, and the 360 enjoyed a healthy slate of exclusive Japanese visual novels and life sim games. That included some porny ones, yes (the 360, to its shame, is key to GalGun’s origin story), but beyond that too. The 360 was the initial console home of Namco’s The Idolmaster, and was also the first place that Steins;Gate was released, years before it landed on PlayStation platforms. Not all of these games would even end up releasing in the West officially, but many had English language compatibility anyway, and lots of the shooters were simple enough that you could puzzle through. It was a golden age of importing niche Japanese games that, not that long ago, were often arcade-exclusive.
I think of this era not just as Xbox bankrolling and securing a bunch of Japanese-made games, but also making an effort on their own part. I think of Crackdown – rebranded to ‘RIOT ACT’ in Japan and given sweet Japan-focused anime cover art – demonstrative of a mission to crack this market. This sort of bespoke thinking for Japan would quickly evaporate.
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Back to the Japan-made games, though. Steins;Gate ends up a fantastic poster-child for what went on to happen to Xbox’s influence in Japan. Around a decade after its debut, that same first entry in the series was remade – but by that point skipped Xbox entirely, instead releasing on PC, PS4, Switch, Vita, and iOS. The shift had arrived.
In the end, Microsoft sold over three times as many Xbox 360 consoles in Japan as it did the original Xbox. That still ended up a fraction of the business Sony and Nintendo were doing, but was still pretty decent generation-on-generation growth. But it wasn’t enough, I suppose, for a continued commitment to these sorts of exclusivity deals and developer relations. Or maybe the Japanese market had simply had enough. Even as the Xbox One went on to secure the likes of Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Metal Gear with a big splash, the next generation proved brutal, with the Xbox One selling something like 90% less units in Japan. Even the niche it had carved out deserted, with many of those smaller games migrating to PlayStation Vita and burgeoning PC market. And that, as they say, was that.
Needless to say, I miss this time. This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprising opinion from someone who owns a website dedicated to the very Japan-biased role-playing genre. But I don’t think anyone could argue against the idea that Game Pass could bloody well benefit from some cheap and cheerful Cave arcade ports. These niche things actually fare incredibly well in such services in terms of finding a new audience. And certainly a flagship Japanese RPG like Eternal Sonata or Lost Odyssey would be killer.
Modern Xbox is aware of all of this, obviously. In recent years, we’re seeing Microsoft make its most concerted effort since the Xbox 360 era in shoring up Japanese developer relationships. Over the last few months I’ve been trying to build up a picture of the moves being made, and though that heady 360 heyday doesn’t appear to be returning any time soon, today’s efforts are at least more notable and noticeable. The noises the Japanese development community is making about Xbox do appear to be trending positive again.
“The Japanese developer community is probably one of the oldest game development communities in the world, having built games for many decades, and many of the iconic game franchises and innovations in gaming have come from Japan,” Mena Sato Kato, the current Head of Xbox Asia Partnerships, tells me.
“Their dedication to the creativity, the craftsmanship, and the attention to detail is what makes them so special and is why this community is so important to us.”
Image credit: Mistwalker / Eurogamer
Kato’s role at Xbox is key, and her joining was arguably a sign that the company is beginning to take Japanese development seriously again. Prior to being at Xbox, Kato had been the vice president of business development at Sony Interactive Entertainment for eight years. At the enemy, in other words. It’s an appointment that suggests that even if the Japanese market for Xbox publishing is difficult, the importance of Japanese games right around the world is understood once more.
From the outside, it feels like Xbox is now picking back up where some of these relationships left off in the midst of the Xbox One’s struggles. Japan’s development community has also shifted immeasurably – shaken up by the Switch and a new openness to the PC in particular. That must be difficult – but Kato paints a picture of a Japanese industry receptive to Microsoft’s new and very different strategy.
“Over the years, we’ve built very close relationships with our partners, had deep discussions over hardware generations and through initiatives like Game Pass and more recently Xbox Play Anywhere, and listened to a lot of feedback,” continues Kato.
“The industry has changed in ways we never imagined, and our strategy of being where players are is starting to be more relative and is resonating more, and all of that combined have really flourished into the many more partnership moments you see today.”
It feels appropriate that Kato makes these comments to me right as Xbox releases an exclusive Ninja Gaiden title from Team Ninja. Given the 360 launched with Dead or Alive 4, it does feel like something of a full-circle moment. That does, I admit, give me a little sliver of hope for the future of Japanese games big and small in the Xbox ecosystem. But this week, as the 360 hits a milestone birthday, I can’t help but look back and think: we really didn’t know how good we had it, did we?
The Xbox 360 turns 20 years old on 22nd November, so we’ve put together a week of coverage that looks back on Microsoft’s most successful games console.
AloJapan.com