Silent Hills is dead, and pretty much the entire series as a whole, which is pretty sad.

While I'm not a big fan the Silent Hill series deserve a lot of respect for how terrying its early games were, I've heard stories of people having near heart attacks when playing Silent Hill 2, and even 16 years after its original release the original game is still bone chilling, few series can't say that anymore, Resident Evil seriously can't.

So, a little sales info about the series, sadly there's not much to go around, the series would never achieve the blockbuster status of its survival horror nemesis, so sales info is rather scarce, this is what I was able to find.

US sales are NPD's, Japan are famitsu's. The system part its of where the sales come from, not where the game was available, for instance, Silent Hill 2 also came out on the Xbox, but there's no data on that one, so its not up there.

Here's something else to note, around 10 years ago when Konami was a games company through and through they had a page on their investors site that listed the games to sell over 1m units, that's what plenty of Japanese companies did back then, however around 2005 when most of this companies either merged with others or started doing other bussiness outside videogames took said page out, Capcom and Nintendo are pretty much the only ones who still have that up, needless to say Konami had a page which listed all their million sellers, and sadly there was not a single Silent Hill game among them, it was mosty Metal Gear Solid and Yu Gi Oh! for those of you interested.

So it seems that Silent Hill never had a million seller title, at least not until December 31st, 2004, however when looking at the numbers up there its rather odd isn't it? It'd mean that the original Silent Hill sold around 100k outside the US and Japan, and that's a little hard to believe, but hey that's what Konami had, better get as many viewpoints as possible amirite?

Games that have completely unknown sales are absent from that list as its obvious as well. Its really crazy to think that the last Silent Hill game came out nearly 3 years ago and that it was for Vita, from now on its pretty much a what could Silent Hills have been, sadly.

Not to be a downer, but goodbye Silent Hill, see you in dead franchise hell, say hi to Megaman while you're there.

Due to the lack of info a bar chart is kind of pointless, but they're really nice, so here.

The truth hurts sometimes.

Sad to see that Silent Hills won't see the light of day.

This franchise deserved more. It still deserves more. Konami fucked up big time, and if they don't at least try to make something even with Kojima out of the picture, then they hardly deserve to be in the video game business.

...

i never knew of this low sales, im really surprised by this after seeing so many people that know about the games not just in the internet but a lot of my friends are fan of them as well, and now that i think about this its really funny for me that this series isn't considered niche when its best selling game (SH2) only sold 1.6 million... and only 2 games (the very first two) sold over a million.

but then we have people saying that the "Souls" series is niche when games like Demons Souls sold 1.77 million without being part of an already established franchise (like SH2) and without any sort of marketing (the thing was basically a stealth release), not even necessary to mention Dark Souls which sold 3 million...

but im sure someone will tell me that the game is niche because its not pulling out FIFA or COD numbers... yeah because game needs those sales to not be niche...

anyway a game with the quality of P.T would have easily sold over a million and im pretty sure it would have turned out the best selling SH game to date, but well Konami fucked everything up

:'(

Here's something that I was thinking about last night.

The old Konami million seller list doesn't include any SH titles, which would suggest that none break the 1m mark, until 2004 at least, however that list also doesn't include games that are very well known to have sold over 1 million units, such as Goemon, Twinbee and Gradius, all which were millon sellers on the Famicom (Japan only) so it seems like the list is incomplete for some reason, did they only add games they wanted? is there some soft of licensing issue?

I was, however able to find an old IGN article claiming that Silent Hill 2 had sold over 1m units in around a month after its original release, havent found data on the original, but given the early big sales of the sequel its likely the original got to 1m as well.

Konami are fools. Silent Hill is one of only a handful of franchises that successfully can be sold on both the Japanese and Western markets. Especially now with a resurgence in interest in horror games, it would have been an easy cash cow. Sadly Japan is rarely known for being good at marketing.