If at first you don't succeed...

German website GameFront is reporting that a press conference will be held by Microsoft in Japan at the end of the week, in which they'll announced plans to "relaunch" the 360 on June 29. That date happens to coincide with the release dates for Sega's Chrome Hounds, Idea Factory's Spectral Force 3: Innocent Rage, AQ Interactive's Bullet Witch, and Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

Japan was the only territory where the Xbox 360 did not sell out at launch, despite having a smaller allocation than any other market, and in fact the launch underperformed by comparison with the launch of the original Xbox - itself hardly a stellar success story in the region.

The console is currently selling somewhere over a thousand units per week - around the same kind of volumes as are being shifted by the GameCube.

Japan just isn't big on this thing. But I don't know that I can really blame them. Despite a lot of talk prior to the system's release, the 360's library has done little more than the original Xbox did to offer titles that appeal to the Japanese market. Even those titles mentioned above, while developed by Japanese studios, are still of the action and/or shooter variety. Where are the RPGs? Where are the platformers? Where is anything that isn't a shooter or a racer (or a shooter racer)?

Some have chalked up the Xbox line's failure in Japan as due to the country's xenophobia and reluctance to buy an American product of a type they've been traditionally known to excel at (consumer electronics). That may be true to a point, but I think the majority of Japanese gamers are the same as any others; they'll buy a system with games they want on it. And Microsoft isn't offering them anything in that regard.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz