Haak, the indie metroidvania-platformer game from developer Blingame and publisher OKJOY, will not be coming to Xbox.
Players on Xbox systems had been eagerly awaiting the game’s arrival, and indeed those working on it had been excited to share their game and its story with these new players, but at least for now it’s not to be.
Announced via the game’s X profile, the team explained the repeated issues they had faced in trying to port the game across, with the Microsoft services required to do so filled with bugs.
The Haak team said: “What seemed like a simple procedure turned into a nightmare due to many bugs in the Microsoft Partner Center, preventing us from successfully completing account registration.
“Even Microsoft’s Support service had bugs, making it impossible to initiate inquiries about our issues. This is simply unbelievable for developers.”
Continuing, they said: “In reality, porting the Xbox version of our game would have taken less than two weeks, but we spent over 14 months trying to ‘apply for game publication’ and ‘complete Microsoft Partner identity registration.’
“This experience has been terrible because we can feel the enthusiasm from the Xbox community players, yet we struggle to resolve the problems at hand.”
“Our development funds are extremely tight, and we can’t afford to wait any longer. As a result, we’ve ultimately decided to abandon the Xbox platform release.”
They finished by apologising to players and praising them for the energy and support they had brought to the release: “This is the first time since we started developing games that we’ve felt such enthusiastic support from players.
“We’re incredibly grateful to all the Xbox players who have offered support and assistance.”
Here’s hoping that the team at Microsoft reaches out and that these issues can be sorted, so that many more players can enjoy Haak in the future.