Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-139.0.72.103-20150208102231/@comment-25467429-20150208175829

This has been discussed in other threads, but I'll asnwer anyway.

The folks at Project Aces had made the suggestion before Infinity's launch that if Infinity wasn't a "success" then that would be the end of Ace Combat. They haven't been very transparent about the exact meaning of "success" or what future porjects they've had in mind, so any speculation about it is just that - speculation.

As for the mutl-platform aspect, that has always been a sticky situation. Spreading the game across multiple platforms with AH was a gamble to net a larger audience. That didn't happen at any significant level. As a console title, it had been long a staple for the Sony consoles (1-5, plus Zero). They wanted to make a mobile version, so a Sony and Nintendo port were the only options, but while ultimately a rich addition story wise, did not exactly sell like gangbusters. It's done well enough, so they've kept it up every now and then on the most successful/available system out there.

Putting 6 on the Xbox was again a gambit. They were hoping that with the relative popularity of the console (not really counting in Japan where the console basically tanked), they hoped they could attract a wider audience. On top of that they didn't have the resources to invest in making it mult-platform with having to recode and so on, so they basically had to pick one and go with it. Well, what happened was the game sold no better on the 360 than it would have done on the PS3 based on forecasts. With AH they basically blew the budget to go multi-platform and put the thing out everywhere they could - and still there was no appreciable, significant, increase in buyers; certainly not enough to ensure longer-term support of the franchise. With Infinity, picking one system was imperative because, again, the cost would be too high to achieve the same level of online integration on both PSN and Xbox Live in terms of support, encoding, etc.

Basic lesson, the series has a niche of people who are interested in the genre and will play the game, and for the most part those fans will follow the franchise to the system it is on. More than likely many of those who do play the game own multiple systems anyway, so it becomes a matter, for those people, of which version they want to buy, and due to the period of release it is a matter of netting the first batch of console buyers in that generation, and then standing pat on that system until re-evaluating with the next generation. If their financial concerns are genuine, it is not particulalry likely they will do another multi-platform, or if they do it will likely take some time as they look to take their time and control the budget along the way. Developing for both the XB1 and PS4 would be a measure simpler now with the much more heterogeneous system architecture, but would still demand some different coding and support, and therefore an added cost they would have to consider. Furthermore, as Infinity is already on the PSN ecosystem and we're increasingly aging into this console generation, they're unlikely to jump the series to the XB1 and risk alienating any of the supposed 2+ million players they've achieved with Sony through Infinity, again with the Xbox not doing well in Japan. Unless Namco Bandai suddenly gains great faith in PA and Ace Combat, they probably won't have the resources to go multi-platform.

Long story short - it's good news that they haven't come out and said "nope, it's all over" but there is no inkling as to when a new game will come out on the consoles, what form it will take, and what console it will be on, though we can at least deem it somewhat likely some future console game will be made and it is most likely to be a Playstation exclusive (PS4 or PS4 and Vita).