So even Iwata has lately admitted that he's probably out of touch with non Japanese territories with his 'antenna' remark but I think it's safe to say that NCL has always been pretty clueless about non Japanese territories. Back in the day I'd say that it was the heft that NoA had with Lincoln and Arakawa at the helm that really allowed the NES and SNES to be as strong in North America as they were from a business and marketing perspective and with NoA losing any real power when leadership transferred from Yamauchi to Iwata has led Nintendo to be incredibly myopic and focused on a (dying) Japanese console market that really bears no resemblance to any other part of the world. They've always been incredibly weak in Europe of course and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
MS on the other hand managed to build their brand from the Xbox to the 360 but with the One they started acting as arrogant as Sony at the PS3 launch thinking that they could use the One as a Trojan horse for.... whatever the hell random crap MS branches want to push into the living room (they seem like a very confused company). That level of arrogance makes no sense when they pretty much came in third in the previous generation until you figure that MS has tunnel vision and is all puffed up from winning in North America. Add to that MS trumpeting bizarrely North American focused features for the One like deals with the NFL and being able to accept input from cable boxes and it leads to the question of do they not know that the rest of the world does not give a shit about things like that? Hell voice recognition as a killer feature is also an incredibly region specific thing. Getting it to work in English is hard enough and making it a centerpiece feature means that they're making themselves look bad in non English speaking territories which will not be as well supported. Did they not think about that?
So that leaves Sony which seems like the only one of the three that seems to understand that console gaming is a global business and each region needs to be handled according to their own unique merits. All hail Kaz?
MS on the other hand managed to build their brand from the Xbox to the 360 but with the One they started acting as arrogant as Sony at the PS3 launch thinking that they could use the One as a Trojan horse for.... whatever the hell random crap MS branches want to push into the living room (they seem like a very confused company). That level of arrogance makes no sense when they pretty much came in third in the previous generation until you figure that MS has tunnel vision and is all puffed up from winning in North America. Add to that MS trumpeting bizarrely North American focused features for the One like deals with the NFL and being able to accept input from cable boxes and it leads to the question of do they not know that the rest of the world does not give a shit about things like that? Hell voice recognition as a killer feature is also an incredibly region specific thing. Getting it to work in English is hard enough and making it a centerpiece feature means that they're making themselves look bad in non English speaking territories which will not be as well supported. Did they not think about that?
So that leaves Sony which seems like the only one of the three that seems to understand that console gaming is a global business and each region needs to be handled according to their own unique merits. All hail Kaz?