So hideo kojima lied about mgs4 being massive for Xbox 360

The game only takes like 22 gigs that’s not half way filling up the bluray

We kinda discussed this back in 2008 lol.

Even if it was 50GB, the game had installs for every chapter due to the slow Bluray read speads.

Couldve easily just been 3-4 discs instead of 1 bluray

Thank you for finally clearing this up.

The original MGS4 blu-ray disc was 36 GB:

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

That's equivalent to five dual-layer DVD (8 GB) discs.

Most of which was the uncompressed audio and video files.

The digital download was just over 26GB because they compressed the audio for the digital version to prevent large downloads

Xbox 360 didn't have a Blu-Ray drive.

He also lied through his trailer for MGS2 showing Solid Snake battling a helicopter and that never happens in the game.

@dabear: it doesn’t matter it probably could fit on dvd

Let's get this straight to the point. It was actually specifically two reasons why MGS4 Guns of the Patriot (and my favorite MGS game I might add) didn't release for Xbox 360.

1. The first reason is it would have required more than 5 disc just to fit one game which the Xbox 360 didn't have Blu-Ray drive at that given time till the Xbox One arrived.
2. The second reason is MGS4 is published by Sony. They hold the exclusive rights to that game but it was confirmed by kojima the game actually runs better on Xbox 360 over PS3 due to the Cells was still a developers nightmare mess. What they should have done is released the game digitally with no physical copy. I would have been okay with that I believe Xbox 360 would have been far more successful if they took advantage of Blu-ray which holds a lot more gigabytes compared to the standard CD format but at the time, MS was hoping the HD-DVD would prevail against Blu-Ray wars but what MS didn't know was Blu-Ray was cheaper than HD-DVD and not to mention, Blu-Ray just looks so good over the HD-DVD. PS3 is what won the Blu-Ray wars as it was cheaper to buy PS3 over a standard Blu-Ray Player.

Kojima didn't lie. He was still under Konami while Konami had exclusive rights with Sony.

I'm not even sure why we're discussing it now as this is was 16yrs ago. But than again, I wasn't around in 2008 SW as I was still with IGN and Game Pro lol.

whats wrong with an old discussion? wait i know your too cool right

Overrated hack, what else is new?

@icrackurnuts: 25 GB is the standard Blu-ray size. Dual layer 50 GB discs were pressed later. Plenty of movies still come in 25 GB discs. Pirates have known the size of MGS4 forever. Weird thread.

the game was not release by sony.

"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."

The Legacy Collection version of MGS4 is 33 GB:

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (The Legacy Collection)

Where did you get 26 GB from?

Now, these are hot news!

The biggest lie was the universal praise for the game, it's so boring, perhaps the most boring game I've ever played. Looking forward to the re-release to see if people are going to play into this grotesque display of everyone pretending to see the emperor's invisible clothes or call it out for what it is.

Anyhow, could be the game benefits from hardware accelerated decompression to save space. Worse case scenario they down-sampled the audio and it's going to sound awful which is an on and off problem from rushed remasters.

@davillain: It still seems difficult to imagine MGS4 on 360. Nobody would have been downloading 26GB+ in 2008, the 360 hard drive was 20GB, the Core and Arcade SKU wouldn't have been able to run it. MS was trying to get companies like Rockstar to not use the hard drive for GTA4 because they didn't want to split the user base. MS was putting limits on downloadable games and patch size for a long time because they didn't want to exclude the 360 Core SKU.

Another thing is MGS4 featured the iPod and MS was pushing the Zune and has a big rivalry with Apple that was flaring at the time especially with PC vs Mac ads and the digital format/device wars and iPod/iPhone vs Zune/Windows CE/etc.

MS also didn't want games to use the HD DVD format. It doesn't seem like MGS4 on 360 would have happened.

Not sure if MS was hoping for HD DVD to prevail (although HD DVD used a video codec developed by MS so they would have made money with disc/player sales). Many think they supported the format so that no physical format would win and so digital distribution would take off. MS had started offering movie rentals on Live! and wanted to push this. They gave a money hat to Netflix to have the only digital app, forcing the PS3 and Wii to use a disc to play Netflix. They wanted to set themselves up with the Zune and PlaysForSure and squirting, Windows MCE, Xbox MCE Extender, and Live digital rentals to counter what Apple was doing with iTunes.

Many thought MS hoped the physical format war would make physical unattractive to people, and Bill Gates was saying there would be no new physical format after this. People got burned with digital service style formats like DivX though, and buying physical movies was already so cheap and not much more than digital rentals cost. Digital rentals would disappear in 24 hours and weren't that convenient for people, so with that and DivX shenanigans people didn't go for digital.

It was also a time when special features were big, where people wanted to lend each other movies, and pizza delivery were giving you combo deals where you would get a free physical movie disc with your food delivery, so physical was going to stay popular.

TL;DR: MS had their own ambitions for digital and they were scared of Apple, but the market leader ended up being Netflix. MS didn't end up owning any significant portion of the video market.

@girlusocrazy: it does not seem difficult it could easily be done on 360 the only thing that probably could have happened was it would be on multiple disks 3 or 4 for the single player and possibly one for mpg it’s quite simple an exclusive contract was going on at the time

@icrackurnuts: Technically it could have been done, but practically there are many reasons why it wasn't made, and marketing/strategy wise it doesn't seem like MS would have been receptive to promoting MGS4's in-game iPod on the 360 when they were pushing their own products and services in the same space and at the time they were having a big digital music/player war with Apple.

Im not sure what the difference is with the Legacy Collection, but the original digital download was about 27GB

1. You could install every chapter just as you do on PS3, making the 20GB HDD size irrelevant.

2. DVD was faster than Bluray in 2008. PS3 had a 2x BR Drive, which read at half the speed at the 12x DVD drive the 360 had, meaning data could be read from the disc without installs.

3. You could offer the complete game download and allow users to upgrade if they wanted..........like people do now.

@navyguy21: Data could be read from the disc without installs, but the seek time was higher and read speed of DVDs was lower than the PS3's hard drive. Maybe with more optimization it could be done?

It seems like in practical terms the game could have been done on 360 but probably MS would have wanted some changes to the game that Kojima felt would compromise the content.

The iPod content would have bothered them, and MGS4 had podcasts that would be released as DLC for the in-game iPod. There was also downloadable camo and other extras. The DLC would have exceeded the maximum size that MS had for downloads on the system, and they'd be promoting the rival to the Zune and Xbox Live! media rentals.

Since Lost Odyssey using multi disks worked just fine, so would've the BS3 Movie MGS Bore. ;o

False narrative BS...

lol :P

Apparently, the digital download cut out various content:

MGS4 PSN (digital) version

The disc has a lot more information on it than the psn version. It has MGO as well as some special downloadable (actually just unzips it) camos and songs/podcast for ipod use (so if you have the disc, look up how to access all this by changing the ip address in the ps3 settings) . All this stuff is not available in the PSN version.

@Jag85: I think one of them is the MGS4 Database that was part of the PS3 version because at that time, I like the idea of using the Database. Seems kinda lame for it to not be an online thing since it’s literally just a giant but most legit most canon wiki for the franchise. I had it back when I had my launch PS3, but I haven’t been able to find it online now.

Edit: I can only assume the Database was never updated when Ground Zero and Phantom Pain came out.

They could have gotten it on 3 discs if they wanted and it was up and running.

It’s a bit of a shame now, because that’s the game which is kind of buried because of the cell.

We can hope it one day gets re-released on other platforms, but it’ll be a big costly job.

Even after cutting out a bunch of content, the 27 GB download version would still require four DVD discs.

Nah, lets say 7GB per disc. In 21GB, they could easily fit it all. Compress the audio, cut-scenes in engine... There are some game you think are huge, but not quite as much as you think.

The 27 GB download IS the compressed version. The full uncompressed Blu-ray version is 36 GB, which would require about 5-6 DVD discs.

@Jag85: final fantasy 13 actually takes up the same amount of space and it’s on 3 dvds

Apples and oranges.

• In FF13, pre-rendered FMV video files make up a whopping 70% of its file size.
• In MGS4, pre-rendered FMV video files make up barely 10% of its file size.

Pre-rendered FMV video files are far more compressible than real-time game engine data.