Also from here: https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Billion-Dollar/dp/1984825437
Aforementioned Ryan Petton quote:
Aforementioned Ryan Petton quote:
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Ryan Petton clarifies MGS4 exclusivity in History of Games book - there was never a Sony deal, Kojima simply chose to not port it to Xbox.
- Thread starter Nightengale
- Start date
EDIT: No exclusivity deal is actually the more interesting discussion point.
Below is old news;
I recall this too;
www.eurogamer.net
Xbox 360 DVD's were too limiting compared to Blu-Ray.
Below is old news;
I recall this too;
Kojima: Xbox 360 disc size to blame for lack of Metal Gear Solid: Legacy Collection
Metal Gear Solid: Legacy Collection won't come out on the Xbox 360 because of that console's game disc size, according …
www.eurogamer.net
Xbox 360 DVD's were too limiting compared to Blu-Ray.
Last edited:
I recall this too;
Kojima: Xbox 360 disc size to blame for lack of Metal Gear Solid: Legacy Collection
Metal Gear Solid: Legacy Collection won't come out on the Xbox 360 because of that console's game disc size, according …
Xbox 360 DVD's were too limiting compared to Blu-Ray.
MGS4 was also one of the earliest games to require mandatory installs, and the 360 didn't have a hard drive as standard.
A lot that storage was the uncompressed audio if you recall. Great early aural showcase at the time.
The graphical assets weren't really that special. That could've easily fit a DVD at the time.
What's funny, if it did get ported to Xbox it would've most likely been available on BC today. Now it's stuck on the PS3.
The graphical assets weren't really that special. That could've easily fit a DVD at the time.
What's funny, if it did get ported to Xbox it would've most likely been available on BC today. Now it's stuck on the PS3.
Throw them enough money or let them make a pachinko game out of it and I bet they will be game. Mostly for the pachinko thing.
Rumor has it that Sony's still working on PS3 emulation so the dream of local playback isn't dead.
It has actually already been removed from it a few days ago, alongside every MGS game as well as MGR, so its not available on any modern platform officially currently.
I think around the time of release there were SKU's with HDD in stores, but yeah that's also a problem.
I mean, Lost Odyssey was across four (I'm assuming) dual layer DVDs, and MGS4 already had those long ass waiting times between chapters to install the proceeding at launch. Doesn't seem unreasonable in my mind that they could have put a chapter per disc. But I also know nothing and could be talking out my ass. Pity it never happened as we'd probably have it BC on the Series consoles now.
it was not well known. It was speculation. Also, we don't even know if HDD or Bluray is the reason. It just says Kojima chose not to.
This perfectly encapsulates how much we simply assume (Sony must have paid for MGS4 exclusivity) and it's all incorrect. Crazy that the stack of DVDs meme was actually the reasoning. I also guess the mandatory installs would have been an issue since for most (All?) of that generation there were SKUs of the XBOX 360 which shipped without a Hard Drive.
Yeah, that's actually news. Imagine Microsoft now knowing this and attempting to port MGS4 to Xbox Series X/S, due to their robust B.C. support 🤣 .
I think that's a project they would be interested in undertaking.
I feel like money hats really only became a big thing in the PS3/Xbox360 generation. Prior to those gens, it didn't seem like games needed to be on all platforms in order to make money and developers seem to just stick to whatever platform they liked.
So it was odd and amusing to see people say things like "PS1 had exclusivity to FF7" and thinking Sony somehow prevented Square from porting the remaster to other platforms. And when the remaster hit Switch and Xbox, there were some who went " oh exclusivity must have ended" as though people sign 20 year long exclusive contracts back then.
Nah, even before. GTA and Tomb Raider for instance were paid exclusives for the Playstation system.
Not liked. The chose the platform that they could make the money with and had long term partnerships with. Nothing really about liking here.
I remember hearing that MS would not allow devs to require an HDD for their games.
I don't think history is too kind to the game. But it was pretty fun at time, especially as a MGS fan.
It will be largely forgotten tho. Greats like MGS3 won't.
Are there any articles that talked about this? I'm quite curious. I shall try to search.
Yeah you're right. "Liked" is not the right word.
FF13 was three disks, Lost Odyssey was four disks on the 360. It is possible you could have fit each act of MGS4 on five or six discs. However printing that many discs would be unreasonable from a manufacturer's cost. Still because of that decision MGS4 is now stuck on the PS3 forever. If it was available as a 360 sku we could have had it backwards compatible with the series consoles. 😢
Both titles that I talked about came from this documentary;
I'm sure there's more; especially during the SNES/Genesis rivalry too.
More like dead with an uninterested publisher.
If it were a Sony "property" like Demon's Souls, they would've had it remastered or remade twice by now. Or any other publisher that still deals with videogames, really.
To be fair, there were a fair few games on PS3 that required installs that did not when on 360, like GTA4. Not to say that a potential MGS4 wouldn't have needed additional space to work, but the calculation here isn't quite 1:1 with how different the hardware situation was for both platforms.
You know, I can't say I'm surprised by this not being a Sony deal, given what we know about what happened with Monster Hunter on the PSP that Nintendo was able to make an actual deal with Capcom for the 3DS installments. Sony really took a lot for granted back then.
"Kojima explained that he had wanted to release the collection for Xbox 360, but the PlayStation 3-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4 could only fit on a PS3 Blu-ray disc.
"The amount of data in MGS4 is just too enormous," Kojima explained on his radio show (thanks, Kotaku).
Metal Gear Solid would need around seven DVDs, Kojima's co-host said, as opposed to one dual-layer 50GB PlayStation 3 blu-ray disc"
Have you bothered to read the thread, at all ? The article in the second post and that I quoted above, is from 2013. That's nine years ago. We've known the reason since then.
It makes sense. A huge number of the cutscenes are just Blu ray video. And there's fuck all game in the back half. You'd just be swapping discs with 5 mins of gameplay in between.
Knowing what takes up the most space in the game, between the uncompressed audio and a fair bit of FMV (including two major cutscenes), I do wonder just how much they could have compressed it down to in the end to get a satisfactory result. FFXIII certainly showed it was possible, even as the FMV quality differences on 360 were rather noticeable compared to how they looked on PS3.
Now, I am no tech expert and talking out of my ass here ... buut, I have played MGS4 many times on PS3 and also completed it via emulation recently (RPCS3). I actually am skeptical of the claims that this couldn't have run on Xbox 360. While the game file size is big on first glance, a lot of it is actually not necessary like uncompressed audio and a lot of associated optional bonuses like the iPod player. I doubt that the core game assets are nearly as big. It is also not clear that the game requires installation, as the levels are broken up into very small segments anyway; the purpose of installation seems to be mainly to speed up the incessant loading screens between levels, it would probably just have needed to load long on 360s without HDD.
No, they basically always existed. Nintendo strong arming publishers to actively avoid the competing hardware was one of the early big ones, but only something like Tomb Raider (which initially was a SEGA Saturn exclusive) gained much journalistic attention. For most of game history I would say platform holders mostly just secured special rights for licensed games (movies and such). Those were big deals for children only usually.
I do think historically a lot of exclusives only ever existed due to hardware differences or lack of budget for porting. Up until the early 2000s it was almost always sensible to release games on just one platform even if it was nowhere near being a market leader.
Almost all of the game's cutscenes are rendered in-engine, with only about 5 cutscenes or so being prerecorded video (outside the weird TV show segments).
That was for The Legacy Collection. I absolutely read that. I'm talking about MGS4 on it's own when it was released. But I'm not directly linking both statements. It's an assumption that could be made, but Legacy Collection and MGS4 on its own, when it was released, are two different things to me.
I also call bullshit on it to be honest. Remove the uncompressed audio and it could've been done. But was Kojima's prerogative at the time.
Imagine if it came out on 360 all those years ago.
We'd probably be able to play it on Series X at 4K/60fps/HDR with enhanced backwards compatibility, FPS Boost, and Auto HDR.
Instead, we can't play it at all on modern hardware.