Death Stranding Hit A Huge Milestone Just Months Before Its Sequel’s Launch

With Death Stranding 2 just a few months away, its creator is celebrating a big milestone for the first game. According to developer Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding has passed 20 million players across all platforms since its 2019 release. That figure suggests strong interest in the bizarre, divisive hiking game’s upcoming sequel, and a larger player base could actually make Death Stranding more enjoyable for its new players.

“The number of Death Stranding players has exceeded 20 million,” Kojima wrote on social media. “Thank you very much. Sams from all over the world are still delivering. You are connecting the world.”

Death Stranding stars Sam Porter Bridges, a man on a quest to unite a broken country by delivering packages and throwing pee grenades at ghosts (the latter makes more sense in context). Along with its perplexing story and a boatload of baffling celebrity cameos, the most remarkable part of Death Stranding is its novel take on online multiplayer. You’ll never directly interact with other players, but it’s built on letting people affect each other’s experience with their actions.

Getting through Death Stranding requires you to build structures across its landscape to make traversal easier. The world was barren when the game launched, and every new player was largely on their own. But by placing bridges and roads in their own game, they also added them to the online world that other players saw, fundamentally changing routes across the post-apocalyptic United States.

While player counts rarely reveal much about single-player games, it really does matter how many people are actively out there reshaping Death Stranding’s world. The milestone represents millions of people not just playing the game, but reaching out to each other to make the journey better. Like Dark Souls’ summons and Dragon’s Dogma 2’s shareable Pawns, Death Stranding’s cooperative building mechanics let players form ephemeral bonds that can feel more meaningful than traditional multiplayer modes.

It’s no coincidence that Death Stranding is hitting this milestone now. It came to PC a year after its PlayStation launch, but only arrived on Xbox last year. The timing is fortuitous; Death Stranding 2 was announced in 2022, but information soon slowed to a trickle. A release date announcement finally arrived earlier this year, which seemed to get players interested in Death Stranding all over again. Aside from new Xbox players, Steam Charts showed a sizable jump in user right after the sequel’s release date was revealed, suggesting that people are trying to finish the game before the next one arrives.

Whatever the reason for the spike, Death Stranding deserves the attention. Not only is it one of the more experimental releases to come from a blockbuster studio in recent years, but it’s also the rare single-player game that actually benefits from having more people playing it at once. So little is known about Death Stranding 2 that we don’t even know if the original’s multiplayer component will be included or expanded, but the wave of attention coming before its June 26 release can only be a good thing for the first players to set foot in its strange world.