An Unreleased Game Surfaced On Xbox’s Most-Played Charts In Japan, But It’s Anyone’s Guess What That Means
Microsoft hosts a list that shows what it describes as the “most-played games” on Xbox. But because it’s never explained exactly how that chart is compiled, that data sometimes raises questions. For example, the most-recent data set for Japan includes an interesting anomaly: Metaphor ReFantazio, which has not been released to the public yet, has made its way onto the list at number 39.
Twitter user Jodie De Haarte pointed out the game’s presence on the list in a recent post, while speculating that this could be a window into Xbox’s struggling performance in the region. Or, as De Haarte puts it, “the bar to get onto the chart in Japan must be extremely, extremely low.”
While it is certainly true that Xbox’s foothold in Japan is not especially great–Xbox console sales are trailing PS5 and Switch figures by a decent margin, despite an influx of games from Japanese developers–we don’t know exactly what data Microsoft uses to populate these lists. It’s easy to assume that “number of people playing” is the only metric, but as of now, the company has never given an official explanation.