Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Encapsulates the Broken AAA Game Cycle

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | September 8, 2025 | 10:12am

Video Games Features Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Encapsulates the Broken AAA Game Cycle

The industry will never allow another game like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

September 1 marked the 10th anniversary of the last mainline entry in the Metal Gear Solid series. This behemoth of a stealth-driven game was meant to triumphantly culminate a 17-year-long run, building upon existing ideas and employing them in ways that technology only previously allowed sporadically, in small, uneven ways. But that ambition was never fully realized. The Phantom Pain is messy, bloated, and unfinished. The second half of its story involves repeating missions until you’re given access to a retelling of the game’s prologue, only with some added scenes to help form the full picture and try to answer lingering questions. As much as it tries, however, there’s also an additional mission that never made the final cut, and is only available in a dissected manner through leaked materials, concept art, and fan interpretations.

Reports at the time claimed that working conditions at Konami, publisher of the series, were allegedly deplorable, with staff’s social media activity reportedly being monitored by management and constant surveillance of their day-to-day work, amidst other things. The Phantom Pain was also expensive, its development reportedly costing around $80 million, excluding marketing and other external costs*. Hideo Kojima, director of the series, parted ways with Konami shortly after, despite the company trying to dispel reports by saying he was on vacation at first.

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In retrospect, both the state of The Phantom Pain and the reported conditions that brought it to fruition feel painfully prescient. The last decade has seen the AAA video game model be fueled by corporate impulses and mismanagement: a daze to cash in on nostalgia by bringing back what came before rather than fostering new ideas, capitalization on trends to try and replicate success to keep investors happy, and perpetuating stagnation, with the AAA model being stuck in the same cycles that have done irreparable damage before, and will continue to in years to come.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

There are no shortages of examples of how fundamentally broken the AAA model is, extending even to the ecosystems and platforms that allow access to games. Even Kojima Productions’ legacy after its director left Konami is tangled in these problems. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is packaged as a shiny new coat of paint, keeping most elements underneath intact from the original 2004 release. The result has Delta carrying an uncanny valley aspect that sidelines the original vision, one that worked within hardware limitations at the time, struggling with tech infancy to push its own stylistic choices. Now, a sign of modern times needs to echo the Unreal Engine 5 framework for validation.

Now and then, you get the oddity: colossal games with massive budgets that attempt to break free from expectations, and mostly get away with it. Death Stranding, with its own myriad of problems around the portrayal of women, was designed to encourage players to deliver cargo on foot, wrestling against terrain conditions more often than aiming and shooting a gun at hostile targets. Years after release, a Director’s Cut treatment was a not-so-subtle hint of a tonal shift, empowering the player with more weapons and fire range-style missions. The sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, is insistent in giving you navigation tools and big guns to complete your deliveries. If you want friction, to feel vulnerable, you have to go out of your way to accomplish it. Novelty is turned into a commodity. The more you progress through the story, the more you start to feel like you’ve seen some of its beats before—from repeating the same villain, to constantly homaging the Metal Gear Solid series, including the never-ending tropes and depictions of women, rather than allowing the new ideas to flourish, and grow, on their own.

The conditions of making games have only worsened since. Developers continue to work endlessly to “fix” games after launch, spending months, if not years, stuck in place trying to placate as many players as possible—all on top of already exhausting development cycles, which keep on getting longer. When I reviewed the early access launch of No Rest for the Wicked, the studio had already spent six years working on it. The game continues in early access at the time of writing this, and judging by the roadmap on its Steam store page, the end is nowhere near. The workers keep on pushing features and ironing out rough edges pointed out by the community, all while dealing with reported internal turmoil as well.

In 2025 it doesn’t matter what you do. You’re likely to be part of the thousands of people who continue to get laid off, as companies compete with one another in mastering the PR-friendly statement, putting the blame of “restructuring” on “market conditions.” It doesn’t matter if the game you worked on did well or not. No amount of work seems to be enough, and no place seems to be secure. The Phantom Pain is an encapsulation of AAA games as a whole. It stands as a testament to how success and novelty are immediately turned into fodder to be replicated with sequels, remasters, and remakes. A statement of how creatives, even those privileged enough to approach auteurism, can easily be replaced, with executives chasing the ghost of their legacies without their input. It’s a tale filled with rage, featuring a group of people trying to band together and rebuild what came before, while also trying to set a better foundation in the process. But it’s one that never manages to escape its hauntings. The pain is propagated by forcing them to relive their stories. Being allowed not to have a conclusion, however, is almost a kindness.

*: Leigh Alexander’s The Final Word on ‘The Phantom Pain,’ a Video Game About Video Games touches on the climate and the early legacy of The Phantom Pain from a valuable perspective that, 10 years later, is both a time capsule and a story that feels all too familiar.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.