Europe has become the new focus for the Xbox 360. Microsoft tell us why...

After its biggest Christmas sales success yet and celebrating a 1 million console lead in Europe, Microsoft is shifting its focus firmly onto this region in the hopes of securing the Xbox 360’s global lead over the PS3.

While the continent has for a long time been the domain of the PlayStation brand, even for the PS3, Microsoft claims that a shift in marketing, more casual gaming experiences on the console and a rebooting of the Xbox Live experience with the NXE has turned the 360 around in places like Italy, Germany, France and Spain. This, however, begs the question of just how important Europe is and has been to the console giants, with the last few years having seen so much emphasis put on North America and Japan as the most attractive territories to target in the console war. With Microsoft now championing a lead in Europe, has the frontline of the console war moved to our own backyard and what will that mean for us?

Speaking exclusively to 360, Microsoft EMEA’s VP for Interactive Entertainment Business Chris Lewis admitted that the new emphasis on this region is because Microsoft considers the Japanese and North American regions as more or less decided between Xbox 360 and PS3.

“If you were to put it that perhaps we feel we’ve done the job we need to do in North America and that Europe is more on the cusp relative to the North American market in terms of our position versus the competition, then I think that’s a fair assessment,” he told us.

Chris Lewis, Microsoft Europe's VP of interactive entertainment

“Europe is incredibly important as a geography for us in line with our worldwide ambition and really the battle is still raging in the US.”

While the console war has yet to be definitively won in any region it remains clear that only extraordinary circumstances could wrestle dominance of North America from the Xbox 360 or take Japan away from the PS3. That is why Europe is now so important, with much closer hardware sales figures and the balance of power shifting from week to week.

However, while all the headlines read ‘Xbox 360 takes European lead’ – even in Microsoft’s own press releases – the nature of this console lead is actually far more complex. When Microsoft refers to Europe, what it really means is the EMEA region, which Chris Lewis represents, covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In actual fact, the race in Europe alone is much closer, with VGChartz. com reckoning the Xbox 360 lead as less than half a million consoles.

This margin is largely thanks to superb sales in the UK, but even so an overall lead shows just how well Microsoft has done in clawing back its position around the rest of Europe, actually turning the continent into a horse race rather than giving up on a territory it had been struggling in. Gareth Edmondson, managing director of Ubisoft Reflections believes one of the reasons Microsoft had been struggling is that its blanket marketing approach didn’t account for the multicultural nature of the regions.

“I guess it can be argued that, from a distribution point of view, Europe can be more difficult because it is fragmented and logistically more complex, and because of that, it has always felt as if Europe comes second or third from a sales point of view,” he told us. Lewis conceded that in the past Microsoft hadn’t dealt with Europe in the multifaceted way it needed to in order to appeal to so wide and varied a region.

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