One of the XBox 360's greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses is its strong audience in the United States. This American audience gave the 7th generation home console entrant the early lead in an industry long dominated by machines from Japanese companies. Problem with that was the it was ONLY in the United States that it had this strength, a sort of living example of the trademark American myopia many in this country suffer from. U.S.A. is not the whole world regardless of what those pro wrestling belts say. And with the XBox 360 losing the sales lead to Wii in its strongest region, it all points to this trait being a weakness.
Hammering that spike further into the board is revelations on who makes up the audience on the applauded XBox Live online service. Hint to the reader: their national flag has 50 stars in fields of red, white, and blue. Read on...
Chris Lewis, Microsoft's Regional Vice President of XBox Europe, Middle East, and Africa, reveals in the latest issue of Edge magazine that the grand majority, the "lion's share" of XBox Live's userbase is from the U.S.A. This was the response asked about Europe's representation on the service. He has a lot to say on the subject. Let's listen to him:
"We don't normally break out the European element of our Live membership. I mean, I know what it is, but I don't want to get rapped on the knuckles by being too explicit with you. I will say to you as a percentage of that overall total, it's just less than a quarter.
And I'll tell you also that a large part of that is in the UK partly because of the language aspect, the fact is you need, on a community service like Live, enough people of a similar language orientation to get a community so that it starts to really blow out.
Up until fairly recently we just haven't had enough on the service for non-English-speaking folks. In France, for example, we've only recently started to get figures where you've got enough French-speaking folks getting a rich enough experience to talk about it meaningfully to their friends."
Asked to comment on whether Europe is ready to live an online life through their living room rather than the PC and Lewis said that he didn't think it is but he thinks "the time is now."
He leaves you with some soothing corporate optimism:
"The whole industry is getting really close to the inflection point where that's what people just crave and I just know that we will offer the best experience. I just know we are so well placed to continue and invest and develop the service like nobody else can."
Maybe the language/culture gap is why Nintendo hesitates in its implementations for online. Maybe this is what holds Sony's service back too. If Microsoft can advance in this area, they will have achieved the near-unachievable.
Cheers And Victory Goes to ComputerAndVideoGames.com.
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