Those who have followed Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots probably remember an interesting quote by Kojima Productions associate producer Ryan Payton late last year. According to Reuters, he said MGS4 would have to "sell over a million copies on launch day to turn a profit," due entirely to the very high cost of the game's production. Now, even with the PS3 selling much better, that'd be a difficult mark to hit, and everyone knows it.
However, Payton himself has cleared this up- he simply made a mistake by saying that. In his recent podcast, he had this to say about the mix-up.
"I wish I could send a message out to the whole world, 'cause I hear about this all the time. It was a story from Reuters, so it was literally sent to every news source around the globe. Yeah, that's how I was quote. If you notice, in the news story, I have lots of quotes in there with quotation marks, but that part of the story isn't in quotation marks. I gotta be honest, I took twenty different interviews that day at E For All, and I remember talking to a lot of people. I remember talking to Kemp Powers at Reuters who wrote that story. And he was very interested in hearing about the console war, about Sony versus Microsoft, and what are we doing, are we going to go over to Microsoft, how much will they pay us. You know, all this weird stuff.
Number one, that million dollar figure is incorrect. I don't even know how many figures we'd need to sell to be profitable. More importantly, that's not something you really talk about in an interview. It's nothing I'd ever say. It could've been something like, 'You guys need to sell at least a million copies to be profitable, right?' 'Well, yeah, that sounds about right.' Worldwide, obviously, right? I don't think that's too controversial, but it blew up... I've been trying to contact Kemp Powers over at Reuters to see, I don't know if he recorded it on tape, but I'd love to hear it. So we can set the record straight..."
Well, the record is now straight, as far as we're concerned. We remember thinking at the time that it seemed like a somewhat bizarre quote...how could he know exactly what the production costs were? And there have been several extremely expensive games that hit store shelves in the past and didn't require a million sales on the first day just to break even. So thankfully, this whole thing has been cleared up.
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