Judging by the Xbox One reveal alone, you'd think Microsoft was completely abandoning the Japanese market. Television-made-easy and NFL partnerships were two highly touted features during the event, and both seem to cater to the U.S. market. Does Japan even watch football?
Given the Xbox 360's struggles in Japan, it's be easy to understand why Microsoft would be better focusing its efforts towards the western market, but despite what may appear, Head of Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick assures that Microsoft is "committed to Japan."
What does that mean exactly? We're not really sure as Mattrick didn't want to go into very much detail. "We continue to build on partnerships, we continue to build on our offerings for consumers inside of that space," he told a roundtable of reporters at the Xbox One reveal.
"We think it's an important market and we'll continue building on the working investment that we've done over all these years."
When pressed for more detail, Mattrick refused to elaborate. "Again, I'm not going to go in to details of the launch until we nuance with key partners and build a market strategy.
"This event is just to, kind of, kick off the big picture – there'll be more news in appropriate ways [for each geographical region], including the content partners, all classes of content, what's been tweaked and what's the same as what we're rolling out in the US."
