Sony Didn't Have Metal Gear Solid 4 Exclusivity, Kojima Just Didn't Want To Port It
Metal Gear has largely been a PlayStation exclusive franchise (except for the most recent games and Twin Snakes of course), but it turns out it didn't have to be. As noted in a recent book by Steven L. Kent, Sony didn't actually have exclusive rights to Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
In Kent's book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming, a former Kojima Productions developer confirmed that Kojima didn't want to port Metal Gear Solid 4 to the Xbox 360.
Related: Metal Gear Solid Being Unavailable On Consoles Is An Insult To Our History
"The prevailing belief around the industry was that Sony must have secured an exclusive deal for the game. It wasn't true," said Ryan Payton in an interview (via ResetEra). "Had Kojima chosen to port the game to Xbox 360, his bosses would surely have approved the decision, but he wasn't ready to make the jump."
In the same ResetEra post, user Rhaast noted the reason why Kojima didn't get around to porting Metal Gear Solid 4 had less to do with his own inclinations and everything to do with the Xbox 360's hardware limitations.
"I'm sorry to say an Xbox 360 version isn't being released, because an Xbox 360 version of MGS4 hasn't gone on sale," Kojima said in a 2013 radio show. "To explain the situation, the amount of data in MGS4 is just too enormous."
The PS3 played discs on Blu-Ray, while the Xbox 360 used DVDs. Blu-Rays have much greater data capacity than DVDs, so porting Metal Gear Solid 4 to the Xbox 360 would have been difficult had Kojima ever gone through with it.
Sadly, it's basically impossible to play any of the older Metal Gears on current-gen or even last-gen consoles. Metal
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