Microsoft may be top of the pack in the States, but their luck has been limited elsewhere – especially in Japan. This week has only confirmed the worst, with EDGE reporting that several large game retailers are scaling back their 360 promotion in-store and turning their backs on the American business giant.
They say that sales of the 360 have dropped by 46.7% since this time last year, with the launch of the Kinect doing little to boost dwindling sales. The most interested part of their post concerns the selling off of stock at incredibly cheap prices, with some top games going for a little more than a dollar.
A lot of people are instantly going to presume an anti-American sentiment in this, and perhaps there is a little bit of that going on. The PS3 is an excellent console, part of a brand that has time and again proven itself in Japan and has plenty of popular titles as a result.
The vast majority of the 360’s big exclusives are shooters, a genre that doesn’t quite have the oomph it has in the west, and nobody will buy a new console based on games they already have/are not interested in buying.