Xbox One not in South Africa at launch

Microsoft’s Xbox One is now famously infamous, requiring a periodical 24-hour check-in with the Live service and other internet-related titbits that make it a giant paperweight in countries without reliable internet.

As it turns out, Microsoft isn’t completely ignoring that fact and won’t sell you a console you can’t really use – thus South Africa is not part of the first wave of retail roll-out.

A Microsoft SA representative said they are working hard to secure a release date for SA and that when the Xbox One does launch here, it will enjoy the same level of Live service as the rest of the world.

Xbox One worldwide support

According to the Microsoft mothership, Xbox One requires Live support for activating games, buying from the store and using the online services. But because they’re now changing from using Microsoft points to real money, this poses a problem for countries that haven’t yet been allowed to buy from the international store with a credit card.

Their solution is simple: only sell the Xbox One in the 21 countries that do currently support using real currency on Xbox Live.

This is limited to:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Russia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States

I’m actually astounded that they’re even going in this direction. I was (almost) speechless after witnessing all the flubs coming from Microsoft’s suit-pretending-to-know-about-games Don Mattrick at E3, but this is just insane. Microsoft is handing the rest of the world to Sony and it seemingly couldn’t care less about that fact.

Xbox sales according to Wikipedia as of 13 June 2013

This plan also discounts countries where they’ve sold a lot of Xbox 360 consoles. With this staged rollout, they’re ignoring half of Europe, all of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, in which they’ve previously sold 13.7 million units in total. They’re also ignoring half of South America, but given the anti-US sentiment there, this doesn’t come as a surprise.

Ignoring Japan and China is a big mistake in my opinion as well. Microsoft put a lot of planning behind supporting Mandarin and Japanese fonts in Windows Phone 7, 8 and in Windows 8 for tablets. By not providing support for those countries which have a strong reliance on Microsoft’s software, they’re cutting themselves out of a massive market and an economy with a lot of spending power.

In South Africa, it’s now certain that it won’t be sold here until the Live service is rolled out locally. How long that will take is something Microsoft is not commenting on.