Serious gaming magazine and website Edge is reporting that Japanese retailers are lowering its stock in Microsoft’s American Xbox 360 consoles due to dwindling sales in an attempt to phase the consoles out.
Notoriously Japan has been a hard market for Microsoft to crack due to its Native competitors Sony and Nintendo being giants in their homeland. But with Both Sony and Microsoft ruling out any major console advanced in the coming year it’s a hard blow if the Xbox 360 is to stop selling in Japan.
Reportedly the Xbox 360’s performance has been poor over the past year as it has suffered a 46.7% year-on-year drop in sales, and has sold just 72,721 in Japan since January which works out at just one tenth of the PS3 sales in the same time.
One of Japans Leasing retailers Geo has spoken to Edge and stated that they are “drastically scaling back its Xbox 360 business” and the report claimed that other retailers are going to stop stocking it all together.
Another store called Yamada Denki who are one of the largest consumer electronics chains in Japan, states that “the company is removing hardware and software from the majority of its stores nationwide, and is selling off its remaining stock at a heavy discount. It will still sell the console and games, but only in selected stores where the system continues to be sufficiently popular.”
The non-stocking and the scaled back appearance for the Xbox 360 console is set to be a big wake up call for Microsoft as any further consoles to be released in the field will struggle with the follow on purchase if they are not already in consumer households.
It’s a telling sign that in the UK and Us Nintendo’s Fortunes are riding low whilst Microsoft are still ruling the console world and it’s a mirror image in Japan.
Could we be seeing a split in Markets in the coming years?