Appelgold wrote:I wonder why they port Ikaruga to everything, but never Radiant Silvergun, which only has Saturn and 360 versions?
Pretty sure Microsoft basically paid treasure for it. All around the same time Microsoft publicly expressed an interest, Treasure publicly said they weren't interested in revisiting RS, few months later work port announced and then later started showing up on xbla listings.
This was all around the time microsoft were putting 'only on xbox' stamps on what was seen as japanese territory games, and trying to push the 360 in Japan and get Japanese devs on board with microsoft setting up support and giving dev kits to people, and has often been suspected for the (cave-related) reason the 360 became the shmup console last gen, at least to begin with. Despite the mind share that Sony had they did not initially have as welcoming an environment to small devs/indies as microsoft had at that specific point in time and the xbla+indie initiatives were way ahead of psn ... also there were some strange policies something like 4:3 even wallpapered was banned on new psn releases (excepting ps2/classic re-releases) for a time as it would make the platform/brand look old ... these days it is of course different and much more case by case what kind of deal/treatment teams/games get.
Either way whether explicitly paid for or not I think it's fairly evident Treasure must be honouring some kind of a deal, or at least understanding, that they had with Microsoft - perhaps also combined with their own initial ambivalence towards revisiting RS (for whatever reason - I believe more centred around Treasure's opinion/fear the game might just look old to contemporary audiences at a time when they were still wanting to work on new titles actively - I don't believe there were any licensing pitfalls around art or music but who knows). After all without some understanding that this was an xbla exclusive you would otherwise often see a console exclusive making its way onto steam even if it never appeared on another console.