Another day, another high profile PlayStation exclusive casts an eye toward the Xbox 360: It looks like Metal Gear Solid 4 may be showing up on the Microsoft console after all.
The Xbox 360 has been on the move in recent weeks, picking up franchises that had previously been exclusive to, or at least strongly identified with, Sony’s PlayStation consoles. The Resident Evil series will be debuting on the system with the upcoming Resident Evil 5, a 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII is in the works and at the Tokyo Game Show last week, the company announced that Tekken 6 is being developed for the Xbox 360 as well as the PlayStation 3.
Now, via a Kotaku report, comes news that one of the biggest PlayStation exclusives of them all may one day turn up on the Microsoft console. Despite having denied the possibility until now, Konami PR rep Yoshitaka Arai told Japanese investor site Morningstar that as a result of the system’s growing popularity, the company was considering an Xbox version of Metal Gear Solid 4. “The worldwide demand for an Xbox 360 version (of MGS4) is quite high, and it is something we are currently looking into,” he said.
It’s a big reversal given that in August, MSG creator Hideo Kojima said that PlayStation 3 optimizations for the game meant that an Xbox 360 version “is probably not possible.” On the other hand, SCEE President David Reeves admitted around the same time that console exclusivity was being increasingly rare, saying, “We have to accept more and more that platform holders themselves cannot have exclusives unless they’re given millions and millions of dollars not to develop a particular game for one particular platform.”