- A Japanese game developer has said that it is difficult for smaller studios to justify ports of Xbox games.
- They revealed that Xbox consoles “are not even available” in the country’s main stores
- Microsoft’s gaming brand has constantly struggled to gain a foothold in the region.
A developer who worked on a farming action role-playing game (RPG). Sakuna: of rice and ruin has said that some smaller companies “can’t afford” to spend valuable resources creating Xbox versions of titles when there is limited demand.
The comments come after y-koichi (who is credited with working on character and environment modeling, as well as helping with planning and writing) teased a potential Sakuna: of rice and ruin continuation. In an X post that we have machine translated, they stated that “sakuna 2 will come out one day.”
This led one fan to ask about the possibility of an Xbox port of any potential sequel. The original game was only released for PlayStation 4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
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“Xbox, well… Personally, it’s a console to which I have a strong sentimental attachment,” y_koichi responded. “But honestly, with our company’s workforce we can’t afford to distribute on multiple platforms like that. In Japan, it’s not even available in major retail stores.”
The comments reflect Microsoft’s struggle to gain a foothold in the region’s console market, evidenced by low sales of the Xbox Series X and Series S in recent years. Japanese outlet Famitsu reported that overall sales of the Xbox Series had fallen by approximately 75% year-on-year in 2025, with just over 31,000 units sold in 12 months.
On the contrary, in the same period more than 1,500,000 Nintendo Switch consoles and 879,000 PlayStation 5 were sold.
This recent drop is easy to attribute to a series of price increases, and both systems will become significantly more expensive in both 2023 and 2024, but Xbox consoles have been unpopular there long before they came into effect.
As CNBC detailed in 2019, the original Xbox was disliked by local consumers thanks to its bulky design. The same report highlighted that Microsoft was struggling to convince developers to create games for the platform, a problem that clearly persists today.
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