Actually, there is a good reason for songs in Extreme AC not appearing in SuperNOVA AC. Back in the 2nd/3rd Mix days Konami made a longterm deal with Toshiba/Emi to be able to use songs from the Dancemania series and not have to pay any licensing fees with the only requirement being that the game had advertisements for the series. However, Dancemania does not exist in the US, so to have those songs appear they would have to strike a separate deal which does cost money. While some songs did return, there were a few songs like Rhythm and Police and the afforementioned So Deep which got removed due to prohibitive pricing. What really does bother me though is that instead of coughing up the money to get the licenses for those two songs, they get crap like Jerk It Out and a horrible Boys 2 Men cover which to me shouldn't have been in the game at all.Ho wrote:Yes, but many of those appeared in mixes prior to 4th also...
It wasn't until 5th Mix that songs started disappearing from the set list. 4th Plus basically had everything that had appeared in the main Japanese DDR series except for Strictly Business and So Many Men.
5th Mix dropped a lot of songs and added several that ended up being (arcade) exclusives. MAX dropped everything and completely started over. I think they realized that was a mistake and revived a bunch old content to go along with the new songs for MAX2. Extreme and SuperNOVA were the same with a mix of old and new, but I really don't know what their rationale is for what stays and what goes.
This isn't the first time that Konami has done this as in IIDX they purged almost all of the old AVEX/Trance licenses in 10th Style AC after the whole 7th Style CS debacle and in IIDX Gold they purged the majority of licensed songs from IIDX RED and DistorteD for a possible international release.
The largest irony to me is that the only rhythm game series that successfully dodged this issue was In The Groove as all they licensed song deals they made covered their franchise in the longterm and not just on a release by release basis.