Xbox One Continues to Fail in Japan

Historically (and we’ve touched on this before) the Xbox has not been popular over in Japan.  Heck, Microsoft in general isn’t extremely popular in Japan, a nation where you’re more likely to have a high-tech smartphone than to have a laptop and they still communicate with fax machines.   In the past, measures have been taken to try to make the Xbox system appealing in Japan, but it’s always remained something of a hipster item over in the land of the rising sun: a console you buy because nobody else is playing it.

Well, the Xbox One recently launched in Japan, and unsurprisingly there were no shortage of pictures being posted about the ghost-like opening parties and empty lines haunting shopping malls anticipating a rush of shoppers that never came.  But to get a real idea of how abysmally bad the Xbox One is doing in Japan, there’s no better tool at our disposal than raw numbers.

Yep, the sales reports are in, and boy let me tell you—it’s not just bad, it’s almost humiliating!

In the first four days of sales, a grand total of 25,674 Xbox One’s were sold… which means that less than half of the 60,000 people who bought an Xbox 360 within four days of ITS launch weren’t impressed enough to grab the updated console asap. 

But here’s the real kicker:  Last week, there was a mere 1,314 Xbox One’s sold.  As a point of comparison, the PlayStation 4 sold eight times that number of consoles that week, and even the old PlayStation 3 sold twice as many consoles that week.

In Microsoft’s defense, outside a presence at the Tokyo Game Show and a few in-store ads, it doesn’t seem Microsoft is trying really hard.  I suppose they realize its more-or-less futile, but it’s still a little sad to see them resign to their fate already.

But then, ads cost money, and if you don’t predict a return of investment… so maybe it makes sense.