This morning Warner Bros. announced that Batman: Arkham Knight will be a PS4 exclusive in Japan, but didn’t mention if said exclusivity would be permanent or temporary.

Apparently, it’s a rather permanent affair, as Microsoft was forced to remove its official page dedicated to the game, which still scheduled the Xbox One version for 2015 for a few hours after the announcement. You can see it above for the posterity. Now it simply leads to a broken link.

But that’s not all: Ubisoft Japan also opened today the registrations for the Japanese beta of The Crew, and the publisher announced that the testing will be done exclusively on PS4 as well.

For the moment the game itself is still mentioned as multiplatform for PS4, Xbox One and PC locally, also confirmed by the official site, and hopefully for Japanese Xbox and PC fans it’ll stay that way.

The removal of Batman‘s Xbox One page several hours after the announcement certainly begs the question on what happened behind the scenes, especially since Microsoft publicized the game during the console’s presentation conferences just a couple months ago.

Did Warner Bros. fail to notify Microsoft about the exclusivity decision in time, or maybe the timing of the announcement was decided to avoid influencing the console’s local launch last week?

Most probably, we’ll never know.

http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/09/09/microsoft-removes-japanese-batman-arkham-knights-page-while-the-crews-jp-beta-is-also-ps4-exclusive/

Welp...

Leaving literally dozens of people very disappointed

Makes sense. Why bother making games for eleven users? Still waiting for Media Create numbers, but obviously there is no future for XOne in Japan.

I think Microsoft will stop X1 production for Japan next year

Xbox already has like no games in Japan. Don't see how he Sony even bother trying to take multiplat games away from it.

It's not Sony, it's the publishers, they dont want to waste money publishing the game on X1 for 12 people in Japan

It's definitely Sony. It's not a coincidence th at destiny and Arkham Knight are exclusive when Sony is backing them both. Plus with x86 architecture porting would cost them almost nothing 

No, Sony is paying for the exclusivity in Japan. The games X1 is losing in Japan are the same games Sony is buying advertising for. Do the math.

Sony doesn't want to waste money actually making games for their Japanese audience. So they just take games away from X1 in Japan.

Wrong.

It's not about port, it's about publishing costs, that doesnt cost nothing to publish a game, it seems you werent there last gen, a lot of games were exclusive to PS3 in Japan, it's crazy to think Sony is behind this each time since they dont need to do that.