Wasn't there a bundle with several games? Maybe they counted the bundle as more than a game (I don't know if they can do that).

Yeah, the essential collection was a 3 game combo.

The problem is that the N4G headline is wrong:

It says: Konami's Q1 earnings report released. MGS4 shipped 3.94m as of June 30, 2008

But the text says: -"Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of The Patriots" shipped over 3 million units worldwide.


Basically, the website on which VGChartz is being insulted on its forums did its readers a disservice by posting an incorrect number in its headline. Not that websites don't make errors.

The soft overstock sale seems to indicate some overstock.

And it is funny, when Deca Sports says 700K shipped (with 540K listed as sold), no one cries foul. Using that ratio, there have been about 3.5M MGS4 shipped -- which sounds about right.

Finally, remember the non-counting bundles cause some error in this. A 250K error is close to 10 percent for the sales volume (using that number for example).

Mike from Morgantown

Mike from Morgantown

This site has always been heavily biased against MGS. They have both MGS1 and MGS2 undertracked by millions when every official source states otherwise.

Old metal gear games in Q1 FY08: 0.2M
Old metal gear games in Q1 FY09: 0.94M

It makes no sense. Probable the number is a little higher due to metal gear solid 4 but not five times bigger.

One question: is vhchartz tracking PS3-MGS4 bundle in MGS4 sales? And konami?

While it may still only be just over 3m shipped, that was when MGS 4 had sold just over 2m, so I still think it is off

Hmm...interesting.

Around 2.2-2.3 million going by VGC. Why do you say so, do you think MGS4 was sold out at many stores back then, so that shipped is near sold?

Big games like that are able to ship a lot more than are actually sold because retailers are willing to buy a lot more. So it's not surprising the lag between sales and shipped would be large.  Kinda like at the end of 2007 MS shipped 8.10 million copies of Halo 3 but had only sold about 6.5 million of it. 

Now we may have the title a little undertracked but we are within reasonable range considering the kind of title.  Now if this game had been a less hyped game then this would probably mean undertracking because retailers wouldn't buy so many at a time.

I'm pretty sure vgchartz doesn't include MGS4 sales from the bundle