‘Death Stranding’ has been played by 10 million people since launch

For a project that was divisive among critics and players alike, Death Stranding has done pretty well for itself. With the game celebrating its third anniversary today, Kojima Productions revealed that more than 10 million people have played the studio’s first game. The milestone takes into account all the platforms where Death Stranding is available, including PC Game Pass. “It makes me happy to think that there are over 10 million “Sam one” players around the world, all loosely connected,” creator Hideo Kojima said on Twitter.

It might seem obvious that a game from the creator of Metal Gear Solid would find commercial success, but it didn’t always look that way. By some accounts, Death Stranding was a flop when it first came out. According to one ResetEra post from 2020, Sony was reportedly unhappy with the game’s sales, with the author of the post claiming 3 million copies of Death Stranding were sitting in warehouses as of March of that year. But then the critical reevaluation of the game began, helped first by the pandemic and then its arrival on PC. In Death Stranding, a lot of people found an experience that helped them make sense of a world that had changed overnight and by July 2021, the game had sold 5 million copies.

As for Death Stranding’s future, actor Norman Reedus recently said in an interview that Kojima Productions is working on a sequel. In the past weeks, the studio has also begun teasing a game that will star actors Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna.