Game news This video game is coming out on PS5, Switch, PC, Game Boy Color… but not on Xbox!
While Xbox consoles benefit from a large catalog, notably thanks to Game Pass and backward compatibility, it happens that certain games are not released on them at all. This is the case with this title.
Does Trip World mean anything to you? It is a platform game released in 1992 on Game Boy and which was nothing ahead of its time. The settings are, in fact, frankly detailed for the time, enough to give a very particular flavor to the adventures of Yakopoo – a sort of “Kirby-rabbit” who acts as hero. Here, the player will have to recover the flower of peace, which has gone missing, in horizontally scrolling levels where you can choose three shapes on the fly: a standard one, a second which can hover for a few seconds and a third, much more to comfortable in the water.
In short, a nice platformer now almost impossible to find in physical version (it was released in 2011 on Nintendo 3DS, despite everything). This was without counting on the work of “Limited Run Games”, a company specializing in the remastering and distribution of retro video games. Trip World was thus entitled to a DX version, in color, which arrived last December on the Switch and a little more recently on PS4-PS5. A physical version compatible with the Game Boy Color is even in the game, however, no trace of any Xbox version. But how to explain this?
A “digital-first” platform
The answer is simple – and it was given directly by Josh Fairhurst, boss of Limited Run Games, on X (Twitter). “The vast majority of Xbox gamers are digital first,” he explains last January. “Physical sales are not high enough on Xbox to offset our development costs, so we have no choice but to ignore Xbox on these games”. Yes, because Trip World is not an isolated case… Recently, titles like Adventure Awaits, Undernight In-Birth 2, or Gleylancer & Gynoug were not allowed their covers on Microsoft consoles. Fairhurst indicates that sales of its physical games on Xbox do not exceed 5,000 units!
Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to Limited Run… Recently, in Europe, several retailers have removed Xbox boxes from their shelves ! An event which seems to confirm the words of Josh Fairhurst. It must be admitted that with Game Pass, which offers hundreds of games (including Microsoft exclusives from their first day of marketing), why bother buying “hard” games? It remains the prerogative of players attached to the physical, but who obviously represent a niche today, at least on Xbox.