The Metal Gear series has sold 60 million copies
Konami recently published a corporate update on its digital entertainment business, which is predictably dry reading—the company is "Creating New User Experiences" and "Focusing on Further Expansion and Stimulation of esports" and I'm already overdosing on buzzwords. There's one interesting titbit, however. Since its launch in July of 1987, the Metal Gear series has achieved 60 million total cumulative sales.
That's based on numbers collected at the end of June this year. As the Wayback Machine shows, when Konami last counted sales at the end of September 2022, the Metal gear series was up to 59.3 million copies sold. Which means that even though there hasn't been a new game in the series since the unloved Metal Gear: Survive in 2018, it's still managed to rack up 700,000 sales in just nine months.
That certainly goes some way toward explaining why Konami has such extensive plans for keeping the series available. The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 is currently scheduled for an October 24 release, and will even contain the non-canon game Hideo Kojima hates. (That's Metal Gear 2: Snake's Revenge, for those who don't keep up with the bafflingly complex history of Metal Gear.)
That collection will be bundling together Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid (including VR missions/special missions), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (HD Collection version), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (HD Collection version), Metal Gear (NES version), and Snake's Revenge along with bonus material like screenplays, music, and so on.
Konami does note that "Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn't supported" on each Steam page for the Master Collection, though we'll have to wait and see whether that's actually true of all the games in the bundle. Previous PC ports of the first two games had mouse-and-keyboard support, after all.
The Master Collection Vol. 2 will of course follow, and it seems like it's going to finally free Metal Gear Solid 4 from its PlayStation 4 prison.