If you don’t know who Limited Run is, it is the company that goes out of its way to release physical versions of games where no official physical release takes place. For example, the company worked on physical versions of Quake 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Tetris Effect: Connected.
Limited Run also helps curate certain classic re-releases. The latest is Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures Re-Sparked. Both games are set to launch later in February and March for PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.
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Up to now, Limited Run has always made sure that Xbox players get these games. However, that is now changing with Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures Re-Sparked. There’s no Xbox launch planned at all – both digitally and physically.
After being criticized for the lack of an Xbox release, Limited Run explained that sales were simply too poor to focus on the platform. The company states that from a physical point of view, previous releases didn’t make enough revenue in comparison to PlayStation and Nintendo.
To make matters worse, Limited Run makes no revenue from certain digital versions either. As a result, no Xbox ports have been developed for the upcoming two games. No money means no game. Keep in mind that this is only related to the latest two titles which are being developed in-house at Limited Run
The news comes from Limited Run’s CEO Josh Fairhurst who took to Twitter to share his experience with previous Xbox ports. He says that if Limited Run could count on selling 5,000+ physical copies of a game, it would justify a digital port. It makes sense – the revenue from physical sales would mean the costs involved in the digital port would be covered. However, while PlayStation and Nintendo sales surpass that number, 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. 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”
But Xbox fans shouldn’t feel left out. Limited Run is expected to launch a number of titles on the platform in the months ahead including Arzette, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties and Gex. By the look of things, future games from Limited Run will be assessed on a case-by-case basis whether or not they will launch on Xbox.
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