Everyone has been looking at all the Kojima news as of recent as a sign that the developer and Kojima are going to be parting ways in some fashion or another. Whether he was fired, or quit, Konami's not talking about it, and Kojima's mysteriously disappeared from any sort of media. But what if we've been looking at it all wrong? What if Kojima's not the one leaving... but Konami is on its way out, instead?
Today came news from Guillermo del Toro and Norman Reedus via twitter that Silent Hills is as good as cancelled. Both the actor and co-director of the game have said things that make it seem as if the game is no more. However, more importantly is where Polygon mentions that "Silent Hills was, with Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain one of only two console games actively under development to be published by Konami". If this is true, then that leaves Konami with only one active game being published under their label.
It's been pretty obvious over the past decade and a half that Silent Hill's sales have begun declining pretty steadily. Mostly due to a lackluster line-up of games in the series. So it wouldn't really come as a surprise, then, if Konami wasn't willing to bet everything it has on the expensive trio that were coming together for Silent Hills, just to see if they could maybe break even. What's surprising, though, is that Metal Gear Solid's sales haven't been as high as one might think they were. In April 2013, Gamespot posted this article stating that the entire Metal Gear Solid series has sold 33 million, which would sound impressive if it were just 4 games... except that between 1998 and the post date of that article, the Metal Gear Solid franchise had a solid 13 games in it, and that's if you don't count games like Acid Portable 1/2, Arcade, Touch, Social Ops, and Online (which brings the total up to 20+). 33 million sales between 13 games makes for about 2.5 million per game. Not a staggeringly impressive number for game sales these days, especially for an iconic franchise like MGS, when CoD, as mentioned in the GS article linked, had sold over 100 million units, and even Halo had sold over 50 million. Grand Theft Auto 5, alone, had sold 45 million units as of February this year.
The Phantom Pain has been in development since, at least, 2011 under the guise of Project Ogre. How long can a game be in development with no sales to speak of, to pay the people who are making it? Perhaps this is why Konami's found a sudden interest in demos. Between PT and Ground Zeroes, this generation's games from Konami have had a 100% pre-release demo of some sort, one of which was sold as a separate game. What if they needed to push GZ out there as a paid game, so they could actually fund the development of TPP? Selling a separate prologue to a game would essentially double the game's sales, at least, if not more (by generating interest, and adding sales), and you've charged $100 for two pieces of the same story, instead of $60 for one sale.
So what do you think? With Konami's publishing schedule cut in half, and the mysterious disappearance of their star quarterback, could this be the end? Could TPP really be the last MGS game, albeit, not by choice?
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