Big in Japan

It's been becoming increasingly obvious over the past year that whatever about Nintendo fans who feel deserted by the company's strategy with the Wii, there is also a growing band of Sony consumers who feel that the PS3 simply isn't the platform for them any more. In conversations in recent months, I've heard the same sentiment expressed over and over again - that the PS3 seems to be engaged in a "race to the bottom" with the Xbox 360, pumping out action games and racing games rather than building the strong, diverse catalogue which made the PlayStation 2 appealing to such a wide audience.

Much of that diversity came from Sony's Japanese studios, strongly augmented by contributions (especially in the social gaming space) from Europe. Yet in this generation thus far, Sony's console has failed to even deliver on key genres which were the PS2's core strength, like J-RPGs - let alone creating a broad church of games that brought in minorities and niches from all around the population, from the colourful lunacy of Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy to the solemn majesty of Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus. Individually, games like those didn't sell many PlayStations. Taken as a whole, the vast collection of niche interests and unusual tastes catered to by the PS2 secured its place as the most popular console in the history of the business.

Nobody expects Sony to break out a whole range of software this week and finally reclaim that strange, diverse market it has tapped for the past decade - served by a myriad of titles, none of them blockbuster hits but every one of them dearly loved by its own faithful. What's being sought, however, is an inkling that they might be on the way; that the PS3, like the PS2 and the PlayStation before it, might be the right place to look for creativity and entertainment that's a bit off the beaten track.

LittleBigPlanet is an excellent start, sterling proof that Sony understands a world beyond guns and tyres. If TGS can deliver even a handful of games that have the potential to captivate even a handful of players apiece, stuffed somewhere into the cracks between the inevitable soi-disant AAA titles, it will offer a solid ray of hope for the PS3 to continue building a strong market in 2009.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is also on trial - but this is a far less crucial trial. In fact, it's really just curiosity on the part of the media and gamers alike. After weeks of resurgent Xbox 360 sales in Japan, people want to know if Microsoft really can succeed in a country which has traditionally been utterly nonplussed about the Xbox and its successor.

Despite some deeply uninformed conventional wisdom that's passed around the industry in recent years, Japan isn't inherently resistant to American- or European-developed electronics or entertainment products. Just ask Apple, whose iPods have done great business in Japan just as they have everywhere else, and whose iPhone is making an unexpectedly significant dent in the "closed shop" of the Japanese mobile phone business.

The problem with the Xbox and the 360 was that they just didn't appeal to Japanese consumers. The industrial design seemed ugly (a problem for Europeans too, it should be noted), the game line-up was heavily tailored for American tastes, and previous forays into Japanese developer relationships were fleeting enough to leave consumers worried that they could buy an Xbox for one or two games, and then watch it gather dust.

Now, however, there's evidence that a corner could have been turned - a vital tipping point where consumers see enough software and enough evidence of future software development to be willing to invest in the console hardware. Barriers remain, of course. The Xbox 360 is still (arguably) ugly and (provably) noisy as hell, factors which don't go down terribly well with those who live in homes with small living spaces - a problem, it's worth pointing out again, which applies in Europe too.

That won't be solved at TGS - but what we will get to see is whether Japanese consumers are really taking an interest in what Microsoft is doing. The calibre of locally developed software on display, and the size of the queues for the Xbox 360 displays on the show floor, will give industry analysts plenty to think about. As Sony struggles to convince the broad market it won with PS2 that PS3 is really the right upgrade for them, Microsoft could finally be about to become Big In Japan - and for once, that won't involve a Photoshop of a giant Xbox looming over Mount Fuji.