Once again, Xbox is losing the opportunity to get two new ports of classic games hitting the market. We’re talking about Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures Re-Sparked. This is not the first time this has happened, but generally publishers tend to remain quite silent on this issue and avoid explaining the reasons why they are not working on physical editions of the Microsoft console.
It’s not like it’s new to us, we already know that the main reason is basically market share. Without quota, there is no hope of sales, and without it, those who pay for development stop betting on the American machine
The development costs and profits would not compensate for the work and they would end up losing money.
The fact is that this is precisely the reason why Limited Run Games, responsible for carrying out ports of Konami games, has ruled out the possibility of bringing a physical edition to the Redmond console. Their reasons are clear, there is no user base interested in physics to make it worth offering these types of games.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work with other games, but in this case it seems like the market analysis they did gives a small enough mass of users that they can earn some money.
If we could count on physical sales of over 5,000 copies of a title on Xbox, we could justify ports without digital involvement, but we only sell those kinds of numbers on PlayStation and Switch. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Xbox gamers are digital.
It’s not that we can’t develop ports for Xbox or that we’re too cheap to do so, it’s that we don’t earn anything from the game digitally. Physical game sales aren’t high enough on Xbox to offset our development costs, so we have no choice but to ignore Xbox on these titles.
When we have a reasonable digital share of a game we are developing, we release it on Xbox, but we have no digital share in those cases.
After these statements, one of the members of the Limited Run Games team commented on the problem on the Resetera forum, arguing that they respect Xbox gamersbut betting on something like that would probably lose the studio money.
The special case here with these two titles is that we are not the digital publisher, and we only receive a portion of the sales from the physical edition. Sales of the physical Xbox edition alone won’t be enough to offset the costs of developing an Xbox version, so unfortunately it doesn’t make sense for us to do it at a loss.
Personally, I understand how annoying this is for fans of the physical format, but unfortunately this is the case for the console.