That won’t be much consolation for the orphaned fans of the tactical espionage action, but the Metal Gear franchise has just reached 58 million games distributed worldwide since its creation in 1987. The previous figure, stopped in March 2021, reported 57.1 million copies. Despite the lack of new releases, nearly a million Metal Gear games have therefore passed between March and December 2021.
Last November, Konami even withdrew Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater from sales platforms, the time to renew licenses related to historical archives present in these games. A problem that Konami has not yet solved today, probably too busy selecting the NFTs from the auction that it will not fail to organize as a tribute to Solid Snake.
As the franchise turns 35 this year, the future of Metal Gear is still uncertain, more than seven years after the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Behind the scenes, however, it is said that Konami is working with partner studios to relaunch the saga in the same way as Castlevania and Silent Hill. In the case of Kojima’s saga, remakes and remasters seem more likely than an unreleased episode. According to information reported last October by the VGC site, the Virtuos studio was working more exactly on a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
For the rest, the eFootball franchise went from 111.4 million to 112.5 million copies between March and December 2021. This is not a huge leap forward and for once it hardly matters anymore since the old PES / Winning Eleven decided to adopt the free-to-play model (with the success that we know for the moment). Available only in Japan, Powerful Pro Baseball games have grown from 23.5 million to 23.7 million in nine months.