Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 pulled from storefronts over historical footage licensing issue

Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are being removed from digital storefronts over a licensing issue, and Konami is working to get both games back in stores.

Yesterday on November 7, Konami announced through a website post that both Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater would be pulled from digital storefronts as of today on November 8. This means all versions of both games are now absent from digital storefronts, and you can no longer purchase them.

"We are currently working on renewing the licenses for select historical archive footage used in-game, therefore, we have made the temporary decision to begin suspending the sale of Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 and all products that include these games from digital storefronts globally starting from November 8th, 2021," the website post reads.

The move from Konami has affected all versions of both Metal Gear Solid games on a variety of platforms. You can now no longer purchase Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty HD or Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater HD on PS3, PS Vita, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, GOG, and Nvidia Shield. Unfortunately, this also means that collections containing the two games have been pulled from storefronts, so Metal Gear Solid: The HD Collection has been affected as well.

Despite the assurance from Konami that they're working to renew the licenses of the "historical archive footage," there's ultimately no guarantee that Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 will actually be made available for purchase again. There's simply no way for Konami to guarantee that this issue will be resolved, and it could therefore well be the case that both games could permanently vanish from digital storefronts. This is a serious blow to game preservation, whether Konami gets the issues resolved or not.