Yakuza, SEGA's long-running open world series, is unlikely to ever be ported across to Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Having started in 2005 on PlayStation 2, the games - headed up by SEGA's Toshihiro Nagoshi - have stayed on Sony hardware, with recent iterations releasing on the PS3.

That's likely to stay the case, Nagoshi recently told Eurogamer.

"At the beginning of the project we spoke to all the platform holders including Sony and Microsoft," he said, "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."

Nagoshi, who's currently working on futuristic third person shooter Binary Domain, was reluctant to say whether the series would return, but said that Yakuza: Of the End, the spin-off game recently released in Japan, was the last of that style of Yakuza.

"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."