Mortal Kombat X isn't coming to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 after all

Home / News / Mortal Kombat X isn’t coming to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 after all

When the great Mortal Kombat X released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC in April, the promised last-gen entries were curiously missing. Warner Bros. said they’d follow at a later time, so we twiddled our thumbs and waited.

But the wait is over now, and it’s not good news: the publisher has cancelled the last-gen entries after deciding they wouldn’t meet the series’ (more recent) quality standards. This decision was reached months after the game hit other platforms, and years after Mortal Kombat X began overall production.

“Please know our teams worked diligently to meet the quality standards set by the current-gen versions of the game,” reads a statement on the official forums. “We were not able to get the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions to the quality expected of a Mortal Kombat game and are very sorry for not being able to deliver the products as originally planned.”

So what happened? NetherRealm passed off development of the last-gen versions to High Voltage Software, and it doesn’t sound like they were able to bring the game to life on older hardware. We shouldn’t be that surprised: Warner Bros. never released a single image from the last-gen games, and the publisher also canned Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Mad Max this year.

If the ports weren’t turning out well, then it’s for the best: Warner Bros. released shoddy last-gen versions of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor last fall, and this summer’s PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight was (and is still) an embarrassing mess. Better to bail out than to release a bad game attached to a big brand, especially after that string of misfires.

Still, that’s probably not much consolation to last-gen series fans that waited the last few months on a promise, particularly with the news being quietly released late on a Friday afternoon – not to mention while the big PAX convention, which is sure to generate news to drown out the disappointment, rages in Seattle.

[Source: Warner Bros.]

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Andrew writes features, news stories, reviews, and other pieces, often when the UK home team is off-duty or asleep. I'm based in Chicago with my lovely wife, amazing son, and silly cats, and my writing about games, gadgets, esports, apps, and plenty more has appeared in more than 75 publications since 2006.