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As predicted in my Saturday entry about Metal Gear Solid 4 coming to the Xbox 360, and the ensuring firestorm across the Internet that raged over the weekend, Konami has now been pressured on the issue, and guess what?  They’re denying it’s true.

“Konami has no plans to bring Metal Gear Solid 4 to the Xbox 360 at this time,” a Konami representative said in response to the rumor.

This has happened a countless number of times in the past.  Unless a direct agreement is made with a certain system ahead of time (like when the first Splinter Cell was publicly known as a time exclusive) a publisher will never talk about future ports of the game until the current version has shipped and sold for a while.  EA and Criterion last year denied several times that Burnout Revenge was coming to the Xbox 360, saying they had no plans for the game on the Xbox 360.  We all know that Burnout Revenge then came out on March 7th, 2006 for the Xbox 360.  The reason they denied the game’s existence was because the Xbox version had just come out in September, and they didn’t want to kill the potential sales numbers.

IGN: July 19, 2005 - An Electronic Arts spokesperson told IGN today that a version of Burnout Revenge will ship to Xbox 360 in 2006, countering previous statements made by the company.

Don’t forget about the chaos after E3 2006 regarding Assassin’s Creed.  It was first an Xbox 360 game, then became an exclusive to the PS3 supposedly.  At E3 2006, Ubisoft demoed the game in the PS3 section on a hidden Xbox 360 and kept saying it was still exclusive to PS3.  Due to the game being more done on the then “canceled” Xbox 360 version, they had to demo it on an Xbox 360.  The news then came out a little bit later that the game would indeed be coming out on both systems at the same time in early 2007.  Click here for all the articles related to this story.

It’s a similar situation with Konami/Kojima and MGS4, but even more complicated. Kojima and Kutaragi, the father of PlayStation, have a close relationship, and both are loyal to Sony.  Unfortunately for Kojima, Konami is not publishing MGS4 for fun, and they will be seeking to profit on the game, which will cost tens of millions to develop and produce.  Unless the PS3 has a huge lead over the Xbox 360 this time next year, Konami will be having Kojima put the game on the Xbox 360 as well, and I’m sure all the parties involved already know that, but will absolutely not publicly discuss anything about this for some time to come.

For the time being however, I wouldn’t bother trying to reason with people who will insist the game is exclusive to the PS3.  Time has shown time and time again that these situations have the conclusion I have detailed above.  Just know that you have common sense, and that the ignorant do not.

Help combat the Next-Gen Infowar by Digging this entry.

(Also posted on Xbox.com)

Joystiq.com’s article on this

http://www.1up.com/ -

“However, Assistant Producer on Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and one of the Producers on MGS4, Ryan Payton, completely ducked the exclusivity question, telling the 1UP Yours Podcast that Metal Gear Solid 4 would “be a good game.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Playstation 3 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.