Since the franchise’s 2005 start, Sega‘s Yakuza series has been exclusive to the PlayStation platform. Speaking with Eurogamer, series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi said that the franchise is unlikely to ever see release on Xbox 360.
“At the beginning of the project we spoke to all the platform holders including Sony and Microsoft,” he told the site, “Every platform holder was negative about this prospect, but we kept on pushing because we believed in the potential, and as we kept going one platform holder that showed interest and saw the prospects of this title was Sony.”
“That’s how we started working with them, and that’s probably not going to change.”
At Gamescom, Binary Domain director Daisuke Sato said that the team had become “fed up” with the Yakuza series. Nagoshi wouldn’t say whether the series would return, but did say that Yakuza: Of the End, the zombie third-person shooter spinoff recently released in Japan, would be the last of its kind.
“The basic style and mechanics is really an old game that started on PS2 and continued on PS3,” Nagoshi said, “Times keep changing, and if we started on some new games they would be in a very different shape – so the last game was the end of one particular era.”