Total sales for Metal Gear games have reached 58 million

Konami has announced that 58 million Metal Gear games have been sold as of December 2021, a figure up 900,000 from the previous number.

[Flawlessmic]

Cool story now how bout you sell the license to sony, so we can get another game.

Bum ass konami, sitting on important ips doing absolutely nothing them.

[Tigerblud]

Was thinking the same thing. Konami doesn't have studios worth buying the whole company. So go get MGS and Silent Hill.

[proudly_X]

That’s pretty poor for all the games in the series. Only GOW sold 20m+

[Nyxus]

Metal Gear isn't such a huge series compared to others. Most games in the series sold about 5 - 7 million.

[proudly_X]

That’s why Konami could not keep up…

You need to sell at least 10m to break even substantially .

Production cost have gone through the roof 🥺

[Nyxus]

The main issue is that Konami just doesn't seem to be willing to properly invest in games anymore. Everything they release is low budget / mobile. And last year's eFootball game was one of the lowest rated games of the year.

[JEECE]

Also if they would have released a Kojima-directed, PlayStation exclusive, non cross-gen MGS with no unnecessary Konami drama in 2016-2019, it would have sold 10+ million.

[JEECE]

But the series as a whole has sold roughly 52-53 million (number in late 2020 was 51 and GOW 2018 has sold more since then). So a huge portion of that series's sales are tied to one game.

Also, if you are younger you may not realize that a game selling 10+ million on PlayStation (many MGS games have been multiplat with later collections but most other than 5 were at least long timed exclusives) was more of an exception in earlier generations than it has been since the PS4 generation. Games did it (obvious examples include things like the Gran Turismo Series and GTA), but even things like Uncharted didn't hit that with its pre-2010 entries.

And yes, this was true despite the large PS2 install base. Except for a few things like GTA that managed to go viral in a world before the majority of people were using high speed internet and well before modern games culture had developed, sales were far more spread out to many games, and a few million sales made a game a hit. Most of MGS's entries took place in this era.

This is the same reason that, despite its long history, Monster Hunter World is Capcom's bestselling game by far.

[Nyxus]

Yeah, that's also true, I remember back in the PS2 era GTA selling 8 million was huge, but today there are several games a year that reach numbers like that, and GTAV has sold over 150 million copies.

[JEECE]

@Nyxus

I mean, think about Days Gone. The game's director claimed that it sold about 8 million in a year. People have disputed that number, saying it may include users playing used copies, but even if you lower it to 5 million to be conservative, if a new Sony IP had sold 5 million in its first year in the PS3 era, it would have been considered a massive hit. I think Uncharted 2-3 each landed in the 6-7 million range, and that was being pushed as PlayStation's premiere franchise at the time.

The expectations are just different now. People actually use the internet and know about games. I have friends who buy PS exclusives now who wouldn't have been aware of Sony's first party games in the PS3 era unless I actively made an effort to inform them.

[Nyxus]

Yeah, and Ghost of Tsushima (also a new IP) sold 8 million copies as well. Death Stranding sold 5 million copies and that's not the kind of game that appeals to everyone. Just to name some more examples.

[JEECE]

@Nyxus

Another thing people overlook that contributes to this is that games have a longer sales tail now than they used to have. People still say that "games sell the vast majority of their copies in the first three months after launch" as if it's still true, but for tentpole games, it often isn't. You can look at charts and see that Sony's first party games keep selling even years after release (Spiderman 2018 is a great example of this, as is GOW 2018). Back in the PS2/PS3 era, it was super rare for a game to have a sales tail like that.

Ghost of Tsushima will almost certainly eventually break 10 million because of consistent sales.

[JEECE]

Lol so basically they got a bunch of panic sales on PS3/Vita from the news the PSN was going to be shutdown on those platforms and then more panic sales everywhere when they announced they were pulling the MGS collection down because they lost rights to the video footage in the games.

[Nyxus]

Well the panic may have been justified too (for the latter at least), since they still haven't put the games back.

[JEECE]

True.

[anast]

Konami: Castlevania, Metal gear, Contra and Silent Hill are all collecting dust.