After booting out Kojima, Konami sells 6M copies of Metal Gear Solid V

Konami parted ways with legendary game designer Hideo Kojima last fall, just as he finished work on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. And last night, the Japanese company revealed that Metal Gear Solid V sold more than 6 million units.

Hideo Kojima in New York
Hideo Kojima in New York

At retail, that’s an estimated $360 million in a single quarter, a very good result for a new video game in a very competitive holiday season.

In the last nine months ended Dec. 31, overall sales for the digital entertainment division was 93.4 billion yen ($771M) for the nine months ending December 31, 2015, up from 67.9 billion yen ($560M) the year prior. Profit for the division was 25.5 billion yen ($210M), a big bump over 10.7 billion ($88M) from the same period a year earlier.

The company also said that Pro Evolution Soccer, its soccer game, contributed a lot to the quarter. Konami also said it had a hit in mobile title Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu.

Kojima, who was the best known game designer, resigned in December and signed a deal to make his next game for Sony. That was the end to what seemed to be a fractious relationship between Kojima and Konami management.

Kojima’s troubles with Konami have been well publicized, and many people expected that he would leave after the publication of MGSV. During the airing of The Game Awards, host Geoff Keighley said that a lawyer from Konami informed Kojima that he would not be allowed to travel from Japan to the U.S. to be present for the awards show. Kojima had worked with Konami since publishing his first Metal Gear game in 1987.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.