Buying Metal Gear Solid V via Steam? Don’t expect it to preload before launch day

By Kris Wouk August 20, 2015

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Digital games have a lot to offer over boxed copies when it comes to sheer convenience: no waiting for the mail to arrive, no need to head to your local game store to pick up a new game on launch day. The one downside is that, depending on your Internet connection, they can take a while to download.

Steam addressed this early on, allowing users to preload games on to their computers before launch day so that the game could be played as soon as it was unlocked. Plenty of gamers have already prepurchased Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain for Steam expecting to do just that. There’s only one problem: They can’t.

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Metal Gear Solid community manager Robert Allen Peeler confirmed to a fan on Twitter that the Steam version of the game won’t support the service’s preload functionality. Console gamers, on the other hand, will be able to preload the game.

Considering preloading on Steam is a fairly common practice, this seems fairly strange, especially since Peeler didn’t know the reasoning behind this restriction. “I don’t have a specific reason, but I’ll ping the team once again,” he tweeted.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain requires 28GB of disk space, so it’s not exactly a light download. Luckily, PC gamers do get a head start of sorts. The PC version of the game unlocks midnight on September 1, New Zealand time, which works out to August 31 at 5 a.m. PDT or 8 a.m. EDT in the U.S. Meanwhile, the console versions unlock on August 31 at 9:01 p.m. PDT on the west coast or September 1 at 12:01 a.m. on the east coast, giving PC gamers a 13-hour head start to download the game.

Sadly, it appears that this may be the last “real” Metal Gear Solid game, at least in the eyes of many fans. Last month voice actor Akio Otsuka, who voices Snake in the Japanese versions of the games, tweeted that series creator Hideo Kojima’s development company Kojima Productions had been dissolved.

The PC version of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is currently available for preorder on Steam for $60.

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