Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Made a Slow Start
According to the recent data, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater made a slow start.
The Performance of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
First announced in May 2023, Metal Gear Solid Delta was released globally on August 28, 2025. While the initial wave of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater reviews was overwhelmingly positive, the game’s commercial momentum currently does not appear to match its immense critical reception. That’s according to several indicators, one of them being the concurrent player count tracked by SteamDB, which peaked at 19,634 people on release day. Though new games that launch near the end of the workweek tend to improve their concurrent player peak over their first weekend, that did not happen with the Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. For reference, the latest mainline entry in the iconic franchise, MGS 5: Phantom Pain, peaked at 91,195 concurrent Steam players shortly following its 2015 launch.
According to an average of estimates from PlayTracker, Gamalytic, and VG Insights, MGS Delta: Snake Eater has sold approximately 218,000 copies on Valve’s storefront as of August 31. Several publisher testimonies suggest that PC can account for up to half of AAA game sales nowadays, but even if the platform reached half of that stated maximum share (25%) in this instance, that would still place Metal Gear Solid Delta’s overall multi-platform sales around 128,000 copies short of the one-million mark.
Another sign that the remake may be off to a slow start is its user review count. As of the late afternoon (ET) on August 31, MGS Delta: Snake Eater had about 3,400 reviews on the PlayStation Store, 3,000 on Steam, and 147 on the Xbox/Microsoft Store. These figures, along with its peak concurrent player numbers on Steam, trail well behind those of Mafia: The Old Country, another multi-platform single-player game that launched in August 2025. Analytics company Sensor Tower recently estimated that the latest Mafia title sold around 800,000 copies in its first five days.
Konami has not officially disclosed how long MGS Delta was in development, making any remotely accurate budget estimates difficult. However, given that large-scale game development projects today typically take at least five years and that MGS Delta lists hundreds of developers in its credits, it will likely need to sell well over one million copies to break even.
