As is known by now, the Xbox One will only be launching in 13 countries this November, with 8 other countries in Europe including Belgium, Denmark, Norway and others along with Russia receiving the console in early 2014. Xbox Europe boss Chris Lewis expressed disappointment in the delay but told VG247 that those countries will receive pre-order bonuses for the console at launch.
“We want to bring optimised experiences wherever we launch, and that includes fully-localised dash, voice, all of the entertainment-out-of-the-box experience,” he said. “All of that, in our view, has to be optimised at launch, and we felt that we weren’t able to bring all of that to all of those markets at launch, so that’s why we’ve narrowed down the launch country portfolio.
“We will add goodness to pre-orders, to those who’ve pre-ordered, in a good way, and we’ll talk more about that as time rolls on.”
Even though consumers in these countries could import their consoles from neighbouring markets, Lewis urged them to wait. “Xbox One will work everywhere and the games will work everywhere, but we’d encourage people to wait for that optimised experience and we’ll bring that to those markets as soon as we can.”
Will these bonuses be worth the wait? We’ll soon find out.