Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-139.0.72.103-20150208102231/@comment-1824272-20150208174654

This year is actually the first time that Acepedia has started to treat the arcade Air Combat and Air Combat 22 as NOT part of the Ace Combat series. Kazutoki Kono said that this year is the series' 20th anniversary (not just on consoles, but in general), so we are no longer treating those games as a direct part of the series. They are currently listed as "Other Games", which refers to the fact that they're not a part of the series, but they are close enough that we should mention them here.

So the series really had its start on the first two PlayStation consoles, because these consoles were and still are extremely popular in Japan. (It's PlayStation + Nintendo or nothing in that country.)

Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation has had numerous theories about why it went to Xbox 360 only. The one I like the best is that the PlayStation 3 development kits were not out by the time Bandai Namco started work on the "next-gen" (back then) Ace Combat game. Other theories include the company not having enough money to make the game multiplat or port it to the PS3, as well as Microsoft paying the company to make Ace Combat 6 an Xbox exclusive to spread the console in Japan. We don't know anything for sure, though; nothing's been officially stated as to why it was Xbox only.

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is NOT a spin-off of Ace Combat. Sky Crawlers is a completely different series. The only reason they have an article on here is because Project Aces and Access Games developed it, and its gameplay is essentially the predecessor of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy (Cross Rumble).

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is my favorite example of what the series needs to do. Ace Combat is spread out now, between Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo 3DS, and PCs. In my opinion, they can't fight it; they have to release future games on multiple platforms in order to spread the series as much as they can and get as many players and sales as possible.

Project Aces is not broke. They're an internal development team of Bandai Namco Games, and I assure you that Bandai Namco is nowhere near broke.

2015 is the series' 20th anniversary. I don't think they'd let this year slide without some major announcement or another. Plus, Legacy +, as you stated, is definitely a show of Bandai Namco willing to still work on these games, even if it's just to add support for the re-release of the 3DS. As far as what the future looks like concerning multiplatform or exclusivity... I feel that any exclusivity from here on out will be detrimental to the series, but we'll just have to see how it goes.