Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is an espionage, stealth and action game developed by Kojima Productions and published by Konami. It is the fourth game in the famous Metal Gear series.

The game was released exclusively on PS3 as we thought at the time that this may be part of the console's marketing and promotion strategy, or perhaps MGS 4 requires powerful hardware resources to run to its full potential. Therefore, the decision to release it on PlayStation 3 may be due to the excellent technical performance provided by the device and its continuation to attract and satisfy the fan base and provide them with an exclusive experience.

There is no doubt that the fourth part was one of the important marketing titles that maintained the importance of the PS3 after the poor launch of the device, as there was corporate competition with Microsoft through the Xbox 360, considered the company's most successful.

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Despite this, the lack of a release of Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Xbox 360 remains a mystery that has confused many gamers to this day, but it seems that the game's assistant producer Ryan Payton It may have removed some of the mystery about it after all these years.

Quoting the website timeextension, which the authors of The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol 2 confirmed Ryan Payton that there was no exclusivity agreement to guarantee the release of Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3, and that the decision not to release it on the Xbox 360 was due to the limited reproduction of the disc at the time.

The producer also confirmed that Konami had created a dedicated technical team to find out if the game could be ported to the Xbox 360, and this despite the hassle my PS3 development colleagues faced due to the complex structure of the device, but most of them were still Sony fans, and many of them were not willing to spend the resources to port it to a Microsoft machine.

Payton He continued in the book that the team came to the conclusion that the game would have run perfectly and without any issues on the Xbox 360 had it been ported to it, and when the game was ported internally and initially finalized, the Konami R&D team arranged a meeting to see the fruits of their labor on Metal Gear Solid 4 and found that it ran without any issues.

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According to the producer, the game was technically incredible, but physically impossible, as PS3 games supported BD-ROM discs that could hold around 54 GB of data storage, unlike Xbox 360 games. It only supported DVD-ROMs, which could only hold 8.3 GB of data, meaning it could be split across multiple discs, something Konami was unwilling to do.

This means that the game's exclusivity on PS3 was thanks to the Blu-ray and not due to a commercial agreement.