Xbox has ‘exclusive news’ planned for this month’s Tokyo Game Show

This year’s Tokyo Game Show will include some “exclusive news” from Xbox.

The four-day event, which takes place from September 30 to October 3, will include 44 presentations. Xbox has a 50-minute presentation planned for September 30 at 6pm Japan Standard Time (5am EDT, 10am BST).

Listed as the Xbox Tokyo Game Show Showcase 2021, the event promises new announcements related to the Japanese gaming market.

“Jump in and join Xbox as we bring our gaming ecosystem gaming to the world,” the event description reads. “We have some exclusive news and content to share and Tokyo Game Show 2021 is our stage.”

It’s the second year Xbox has held a TGS event. Last year it announced Flight Simulator content related to Japan and discussed Series X|S plans in the country.

The presentation will be the latest part of Xbox’s attempt to make an impact in Japan, something it’s struggled to do ever since the original Xbox launched 20 years ago.

Last year Xbox head Phil Spencer said the platform’s market position in Japan “isn’t acceptable” and pledged to do “a much better job” with the Series X launch in the region.

As part of its acquisition of Bethesda in March, Microsoft also acquired Tokyo studio Tango Gameworks, a move that Spencer said was “a great step” towards achieving Xbox’s ambitions in Japan.

“I’ve talked for a long time about our desire to have more of a first-party presence in Japan,” he said following the acquisition. “This is a great step there. Thinking about the map of where these teams are, and talking about all the games they’re working on, I can’t wait to speak to the Tango team and get to know them.”

Microsoft has also been courting Japanese indie developers in the continued hope of helping the Xbox find a foothold in the Japanese market.

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In June, Xbox’s business lead for Asia, Jeremy Hinton, told IGN Japan: “Recently, we’ve been connecting with more and more Japanese indie developers, and we’ve never seen so many Japanese indie developers with our development kits before.

“The indie scene in Japan is growing, and we are paying close attention.”

Hinton also reiterated that the Japanese market is important to Xbox, and that despite the platform holder’s continued failure to see sizeable sales in the region he sees its decision to supply Series X and S consoles to Japan during a time of limited stock as a justified one.

“At Xbox, we’re not only looking at markets that are already successful, but also markets that are still growing, and it’s clear that Japan is a market that we can’t ignore,” he explained.

“Japan is currently the largest and fastest growing market in the world, with particularly strong growth in the last 12 months.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Hinton stated that Xbox plans to localise all first-party games for Japan going forwards, and revealed that the company feels the Series S will be more in demand because he’s “seen a lot of Japanese users on Twitter tweeting about how cute and compact the console is”.

Major Japanese retailers quickly sold out of their initial Xbox Series X and S pre-orders when they went up last September, in what appeared to be a positive start for Microsoft’s next-gen consoles in the region.

Given Xbox’s historically poor market performance in Japan, Series X and S stock allocation is unlikely to have been high for the region’s pre-orders. Regardless, it’s a positive start in a country where Xbox has typically struggled, but one which it claimed last year had become its fastest-growing.