Since its release Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom has sold 3 million units globally but compared to its budget, its got a ways to go before it likely breaks even let alone makes a profit.
From the prior Nikkei report we know the games development budget was around $80 million, couple that with the obviously sizable marketing and distribution costs means The Phantom Pain will likely need to sell quite a bit more before it breaks even.
This is because most modern marketing budgets can often be larger than the games development costs, so its likely that The Phantom Pain would need to sell around 5-6 million units to break even. Maybe even more than that.
Whats more the initial launch of a game tends to see the bulk of its sales and then they tend to fall off pretty quickly after that. So making your costs back only gets harder the further you get from the games launch.
In addition Metal Gear Solid 4 had a similar amount of initial launch sales and that was only on one platform. The Phantom Pain is on multiple platforms so in that sense it is already performing poorer compared to the previous game, as that was a console exclusive.
While we have pretty much the entirety of the press rightly praising the games content and execution, the omission and ignorance of its cost to get to this point is worrying.
This is because, sadly, the games industry is not one based around creative patronage. Its very much a business.
When big budget games dont or take a long time to make their money back, publishers tend to pull the plug on studios.
This is bad for gaming and gamers alike.
In the last decade weve already lost a huge amount of developers from the industry and that has resulted in a wave of risk averse functionally standardized big budget failures, which in turn has fed into this dangerous downward spiral for console game production.
In the case of Konami that trigger has already been pulled, again likely based off a long-running trend of big budget games that didnt sell like they were required to.
So when games like this are praised without acknowledging the cost, the conflation is an oddly caustic and damaging one.
Its no secret that the games industry craves cultural recognition, so annoying real world things like budgets tend to sully a purely cultural argument but in doing so it lets a lot of managerial decision makers off the hook when they over spend.
As without that transparency its very difficult to accurately appraise a publishers or studios production efficiency and the subsequent quality of their games.
After all a studio that can deliver a great and popular game for a decent budget is clearly better than a studio that spends the GDP of a small country to do the same.
From a gaming standpoint you want studios that can deliver games sustainably relative to their budgets and sales.
Otherwise you end up in a situation where people are buying consoles but there are fewer and fewer games to play on them due to the increasing scarcity of studios to make them, which is roughly the situation we are in now.
Dont get me wrong; I am all for good games and I know The Phantom Pain is a thoroughly brilliant one. Yet for all its critical success, this victory could be entirely pyrrhic if it doesnt make its costs back and quickly too.
In some ways it could be argued that the current situation with Hideo Kojima and Konamis subsequent reticence to fund similar console games in the future is an indication, in a real world business sense at least, that the game has already failed.
The sooner publishers make their development costs public the better, the industry badly needs transparency on how much games cost to make otherwise console gaming will have serious problems ahead of it in regards to its sustainability.
