Are you undecided about which console to get next gen? Or perhaps you want to get both? Well here’s something you should know – you have to live in one of the following 21 countries to even be able to play the Xbox One:
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Brazil
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Italy
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Russia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
- United States
These are the countries the One’s Xbox Live will support at launch and, as you need to connect every 24 hours to do anything other than play movies, you won’t be able to use it, even for singleplayer only experiences.
As you can probably tell, the above list omits a huge number of countries, many of which do have lucrative gaming populations. For example, it was revealed in 2011 that the PS3 had passed 400,000 sales in Poland, while PSLS’ own Alvaro Bernedo wrote a fantastic article on gaming in Peru. Then there’s the whole of the Middle East, India and, of course, Japan.
Sony isn’t planning to launch the PS4 outside of the US or Europe this holiday season either (at least, they’ve kept quiet about Japan), but it will be region free, so you can import. And, for many – such as gamers in China – importing has been the only option the entire generation. This also begs the question: will developers outside of those 21 countries (like The Witcher‘s CD Projekt RED) even be able to play their games on a home console, or will they be stuck with a few debugs?
Not only is Microsoft sacrificing sales in tons of regions that, while small individually, add up to a significant audience, they are letting down gamers who don’t live in a large enough country. China has also been an area where, if the country loosens its restrictions on consoles, could be huge for either PlayStation or Xbox, so any foothold gained now is vital.
Do you think Sony will be able to use this opportunity to swoop in and take all the sales in smaller countries? Or should they just get a 360?
Let us know how you think this’ll affect the next gen in the comments below.
