20 reasons the Xbox will fail in Japan (or not)

After an embarrassing rookie season in Japan, Microsoft and its latest Xbox console bounced back at its Tokyo Xbox Summit 2005, where it proudly announced every single Japanese publisher is along for the Xbox 360 ride. Ridge Racer is coming, so is Final Fantasy and mega-popular Winning Eleven. Things look upbeat.

But why should you care whether Xbox 360 succeeds in Japan? Well, it's important if you like diversity in your Xbox game collection - a range of developers are working on games in an even more varied set of genres. In short, there's a reason why Japan-powered games like Viewtiful Joe and Resident Evil 4 are on PS2 and GameCube (and not Xbox) - it's not worth releasing an Xbox version in Japan when only 500,000 have one in their homes.

There are enough reasons (we have ten) to believe things will be different next round, and Xbox 360 will eat away at PlayStation's dominance in Japan. Yet there are those who still believe Japan will never embrace a non-Japanese game console (and we've got ten reasons why these arm-chair analysts are correct.) Warm up your typing fingers as we give you ten reasons why Xbox 360 could kick ass in Japan, and ten reasons why it could bomba bomba in Kutaragi's backyard.

Read the reasons in an interesting article here: