Jeff: That was something that I think we we said last year as we were kind of wrapping up the year and 'okay, what's our game of the year' and all that kind of of stuff - it's that feeling of, you know, we get asked a lot of [by] friends, family: 'hey, you know I'm shopping for the holidays, what should I get?'
Phil: Yeah.
Jeff: The thing I had realised on the heels of building what I felt were the best games of 2017, it's really hard for me to recommend a console that doesn't have Nier on it, and you have these situations where these games are coming to PS4, and then PC, and still SOMEHOW not making it on to the Xbox! And you know, I think we saw a few games outta Square this year that were announced in a similar capacity. It seems like there's more work to be done.
Phil: Totally!
Jeff: I mean definitely looking at the briefing, it's seem like you're on the road.
Phil: I'm climbing the mountain. I'll be back over [in Japan] this summer, and you know it really is the feedback loop of our audience supporting those games when they come, I think we've seen that with things like Monster and Resident Evil, and getting to be bring Tales of Vesperia onto the stage - I've said this of any country where Xbox marketshare suffers, I think it's Japan. We're the away team.
Jeff: I was in Japan when the original Xbox launched, and was there in the room where Bill Gates was handing them out.
Phil: So when those developers are going home, they're probably not playing on an Xbox, which means you've just go to do the work. You've gotta go over there, you got to build the relationships. I knew a lot of the developers when I was in first party, now [sic] getting more plugged into the third party management, trying to give them feedback on what I think can help with global success of some games and then seeing some of those things work out... announces like [Dragon Ball FighterZ] last year where I think they start to see 'hey this audience does really react' and we can give them a platform.
Jeff: I'm in the middle of watching Dragon Ball for the first time. That game did that. I did not expect it to go that way, believe me, but here we are.
Phil: We're not done. I see what people want, I want all of the games to be playable on Xbox, at least the ones that make it there, I want them to obviously play very well on Xbox, and Japan is the one place where I feel it's literally getting on the ground and doing the work.
Jeff: It seems like that maybe waxes and wanes a little bit. I remember prior to the original Xbox launch we had Seamus Blackley come in with a copy of DoA and he was saying at the time 'I have an apartment over there, I'm there, I'm making sure this stuff happens' - it seemed like at launch of that first console there was that feeling of 'we gotta make this work in Japan.'
Phil: Yeah.
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Jeff: So is that something that just, you know, waxes and wanes as people maybe take their eye of the ball a bit, and now you're like 'we've got a bit of a deficit again here with games from this territory' like 'we've gotta get out there'?
Phil: Yeah, I think you have to have a long term perspective. I will also say, and this isn't defence of any kind of people running our teams, the Japanese development community went through a time where it was unclear how importnat console was going to be. A lot of them moved to mobile. I worked on Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, and that was another time in the 360 generation when we said 'okay, we're gonna try again.' I think my view that's maybe a little different is: I love selling Xboxes in Japan and I would love to be the market leader in Japan, but I kind of take a different view is: I want Japanese developers to have success globally, and I think I can help there. So I guess my tactic is just a little different, I'm not trying to go in and trying to get them to help us in Japan, I'm trying to say 'here's how I think Monster Hunter can be a great game' and that's just an example of talking with the Capcom team long, long ago. They've signed the marketing deal with Sony, but I was like 'I don't care who's marketing your game, I want your game to be great.'
Jeff: Still coming to your platform.
Phil: That's right. Those kind of conversations have landed very well as you can go, put a controller in your hand, sit with the creators and talk about what you see having global success on your platform. Those developers for the most part want to reach a global audience. The area where we still, I'd say, have less success, is games that really see the Japanese market for their game as 80-90% of where their units sales are going to come from the game, and if they don't see a big global market, then it is more challenging for me, there's no doubt about it.
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Phil: [sic] I'm not giving up. I do think, and not to bring it back to some marketing spiel on Game Pass, but it's actually a perfect thing where you can start to put regional content into a subscription. I mean you see this with some of the video subscriptions, where you get movies from India and they get very popular, and you see it with manga and you see it with other things that show up in these video services. So I've been thinking about how, 'well how can Game Pass help these teams' where 'yeah, maybe you're not going to have a huge retail presence, but I can build a business deal with you to bring the games in, and they can reach the global audience that might be interested in your game... I'm gonna keep working on it. The success we had this year was better than last year, and I was incredibly proud of the games that were there and I think I'm at TGS again this year and I'll keep working on it.
