Seven years after Sam Porter Bridges first strapped a stack of cargo to his back, Kojima Productions says the Death Stranding series has passed 28 million players. The studio marked the anniversary of the original game’s November 8, 2019 PS4 launch with commemorative posters and a message from Hideo Kojima.
The number needs some context. It counts players, not copies sold, so anyone who played through a subscription service or a free giveaway is included. It also combines the original Death Stranding, the Director’s Cut and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, without separating them by game or platform. That makes it a good measure of how many people have tried the series and a poor guide to how much it has earned, or how the sequel is doing on its own.
Publishers are increasingly using player counts instead of sales because the totals are larger and include access through Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, free promotions and cloud services. Death Stranding has benefited from all of these. After its PS4 debut, the original came to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, joined PC Game Pass, was given away on the Epic Games Store, and is now available on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Amazon Luna. Few games that started as console exclusives have spread this widely.
The timeline shows growth slowing. The original stood at 20 million players at the end of March 2025. By late July 2026, with the sequel out on PS5 and arriving on PC in March, the series total had reached 27 million. Gaining another million took about three and a half months, which is a steady pace but well below the sequel’s launch period. An Xbox version of On the Beach could boost the count again, but none has been announced and the only basis for that idea so far is a store listing rumour.
Kojima has also been in the news for other reasons this year, from voicing a character in a My Chemical Romance stop-motion short to saying cloud gaming concerns him more than PlayStation moving away from discs. That comment stands out given how much of Death Stranding’s reach has come from digital storefronts, subscriptions and streaming.
It’s a notable change for a game that sharply divided critics and players in 2019, when many dismissed it as a walking simulator. Twenty-eight million players doesn’t settle that argument, but it does show how many people have been willing to try Kojima’s unusual delivery game.