Is there a brutally violent, melee combat character in the exclusive 360 world which is MS IP? The Gears dudes are shooters, and their character IPs are owned by Epic. Bungie owns the Halo dude and he's a shooter.

Negotiating MK character exclusivity is problematic in that where's the benefit for the character's owner? There is none, only for MS and NR. So that means an upfront payment to the character's owner. NR clearly don't want to pay another dev money. MS were probably unwilling to knowing that, end of the day, there's not much benefit likely to accrue to MS because MK is never going to be a massive game, and it certainly isn't going to be a system seller. So, the only way a 360 exclusive character gets on the 360 version of MK is if MR pay a 3rd party dev for the privilege and  hence NR gets bugger all direct financial benefit and the only winner is some 3rd party who just gets some free advertising for their own game franchise. I can see why NR might have wanted to get a 360 exclusive character but decided it was too much like hard work.

Sony itself owns Kratos, which makes negotiating an exclusive character easy as pie. The benefits to the owner of the character without having to receive payment from NR are obvious. So it's a win-win-win for Sony, PS3 and NR.

It really amazes me how many here are actually dodging the issue and saying things like MS wanted to much money or something.  It never ceases to amaze me how far devotion to a company can affect someone's ability to reason clearly.  We've seen stuff like this before this gen.  We know the deal.