European 360 sales have long trailed those in the US, despite the region’s larger population. With the PlayStation brand retaining strong cachet, Xbox 360 routinely sells the fewest consoles each week in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
“[Europe is] a very textured region, as you know very well, and we enjoy fabulous success in some parts of the region and relative marginal success in others,” Lewis said in a recent interview. “And our plan quite clearly is to invest in the right marketing, the right content and to align the platform in a way that we are hugely successful everywhere.
“Where we’ve done well traditionally is where we were in with the first Xbox. The UK is an example of that. The gaming tastes in the UK are quite well aligned with the US – there’s a higher disposable income for a start – we very deliberately set out to appeal to the core space in the first instance and we did that very well. I think the challenges are some of the more Mediterranean markets. Let’s pick on France, Italy and Spain, for example. There’s a much more casual gaming orientation there – people like to dip in and out, they’re not perhaps so likely to buy multiple consoles and they are more price-sensitive markets.
“I would also put our marketing fairly central to it in as much as I’m not sure we work hard enough to develop locally customisable, culturally connected marketing in the way that we needed to. We are addressing all that and I think we’ve got a much deeper insight, much higher levels of empathy with that now than we had in the first few years and phases."
While promising to “continue to invest in and protect the core”, Lewis said it was necessary to “have games that are not intimidating and dark, that mums and dads can get involved in without the incumbent humiliation”. Games such as Lips, Scene It? and Primetime, which require heavy customisation spends.
“Clearly what you can’t do is go storming into different markets with a somewhat vanilla-based proposition, assuming that the different cultures will adopt it. Will it continue to be a big challenge to accommodate the different tastes around the region? Yes. Will we disproportionately invest to make sure that we will do that effectively in Europe? Yes, we will.”