Your statement is very cynical.
Who is to say if there is an audience or not for niche Japanese game (or AAA Japanese games) on Xbox or not digitally?
AFAIK, putting out a digital copy of your SKU is cheaper and far less risky than printing a ton of discs that won't sell.
Is there cost involved supporting another platform? Sure. But the risks are lower and the chances of increased revenue are greatly improved.
Specifically, right now on Xbox is a dearth of quality Japanese games compared to PS4.
So if you're NIS or Falcom, why not take the plunge and test the Xbox digital waters? You'd be fighting less Japanese competition, because on Xbox, there basically isn't any. It's free market share.
As to giving up rights as a consumer...tell me...
how many Steam games do you own?
I think many other posters have already explained this in detail, but I'll elaborate to give you more of an idea.
First off, the Xbox is completely dead in Japan. It sells anywhere from 40-90 consoles a week in Japan, if that. Those numbers are, frankly, abysmal. Obviously the market for Xbox is more vibrant in the US and Europe (but really only the UK, Xbox performs poorly in most EU markets as well), but the companies you are talking about are Japan-centric companies. Falcom in particular is a very conservative, small company. They don't have their own western localization branch, and the western market is generally an afterthought to them. They will never develop a title for Xbox as long as Xbox does not sell in Japan. Nipon Ichi Software Japan is similar in this regard, they mainly release on Sony hardware and have just started with Switch to support Nintendo hardware more heavily.
That should make it clear why these smaller Japanese companies don't release on Xbox in Japan. You might say, why don't the localization companies port the games over to Xbox? Not a completely ridiculous question, as these companies do port games to PC. But once you get into the details, it's pretty easy to understand why they don't port to Xbox. First off, Sony platforms, Nintendo platforms, and PC are all proven markets for Japanese games. In the case of Sony and Nintendo, most games a localization company picks up are already on these platforms, so no porting is necessary, just localization and implementation of the localization. These are the ideal projects for a localization company, as these companies are usually small and often have very few, if any, technical staff. Basically the only ports being done by localization companies right now are PC ports, and success varies. Just asking a localization company to do a PC port is a huge undertaking for them, much more expensive than a normal localization. The risk should be worth it though, since people do buy Japanese games on PC. Adding another platform to that, any platform, makes the risk and burden that much higher, likely more than most companies can take on.
So why not Xbox over PC? That's simple. The PC market has proven viable for some niche Japanese releases. Xbox has not. It's too big of a risk. Add on top of that the inability to make a limited physical run or collector's edition with a higher profit margin that your hardcore will eat up, and there you have it. The only way this will change is if Xbox starts miraculously selling well in Japan (it wont) or Microsoft assists localization companies or Japanese devs with porting their games (unlikely).
