Xbox One Still Selling Badly in Japan

Good news for Nintendo over the weekend: The Wii U’s sales have been on the rise with all the new must-own games on the system! Well, that’s great for Nintendo, but Microsoft, well… isn’t quite as lucky. At least, not in Japan.

As we’ve covered before, the Xbox gaming system (or Microsoft in general) doesn’t do well in Japan, despite Japan being considered as one of the bigger gaming countries out there, and the homeland of console gaming (not technically, but figuratively). Famously, Microsoft tried everything from getting a special team of marketers in Japan to hiring the creator of Dragon Ball to make a JRPG for them, and yet, sales remained weak.

How weak, you ask? Perhaps some recent news should help put things in perspective: some new sales data has been released by Media Crate, listing how many game systems have been sold over the week of June 8th to June 14th. The best seller of that week, unsurprisingly, was the New LL 3DS, with 19,620 sold—not bad, for a country with over 120 million people.

The worst seller? The Xbox One—it only sold 100 units.



If you know anything about marketing, that is dismal. That’s the kind of sales you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies. It is stupid bad, and the data from the folks at Media Crate suggest the problem has only gotten worse since, with no improvement in sight for Microsoft. Simply put, when it comes to Japan, they are losing a lot of money, fast.

Almost enough to make someone wonder why they even try anymore.