It's been a couple of years now since Limited Run began working with Microsoft to bring a bunch of physical Xbox releases to market, and we've seen some great examples ever since, such as Quake 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, Tetris Effect: Connected and many, many others.
However, there are still times when Xbox doesn't make the cut, such as this week's recent reveals of Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures Re-Sparked. Both of these are releasing on everything except Xbox, and it'll come as no surprise that Limited Run has received criticism from Xbox fans for making that decision.
In response to this, a couple of folks over at Limited Run have explained the reasons behind it, and they don't make for great reading! Basically, physical Xbox games fail to make enough revenue for Limited Run compared to PlayStation and Nintendo, and a digital port isn't viable as the company isn't earning anything digitally in this case.
Here's what the Limited Run CEO Josh Fairhurst had to say on Twitter yesterday:
"If we could count on selling 5,000+ of a title physically on Xbox, we could justify the ports without a digital stake, but we only sell those kinds of numbers on PlayStation and Switch. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Xbox gamers are digital first."
"It's not that we can't develop Xbox ports or that we're too cheap to do it, it's that we don't earn anything on the game digitally. Physical game sales are not high enough on Xbox to offset our development costs, so we have no option but to skip Xbox on these titles."
"When we do have a reasonable digital share in a game we're developing, we do release it on Xbox, but we have 0 digital share on these ones."
These comments were also echoed by another Limited Run team member over on Resetera, who explained that because there's no digital share in this specific instance, a physical Xbox version would likely lose the company money.
"The specific case here with these two titles is that we are not the digital publisher, and are only getting a cut of the physical edition's sales. The sales of the physical Xbox edition alone will not make up for the development costs of an Xbox version so it unfortunately just doesn't make sense for us to do it at a loss."
It's a sad situation for sure, but it's also an understandable one. We've known for a long time now that Xbox owners are moving away from physical purchases - after all, the Xbox Series S doesn't even have a disc drive! The good news is that there are still plenty more Xbox physical releases to come from Limited Run such as the Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties: Definitive Edition, Gex Trilogy and others, but don't count on seeing Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures Re-Sparked on Xbox anytime soon.