Did you hear the news? There's a new Metal Gear Solid game coming!
Except not really. Konami's first entry in the franchise after the departure of series creator Hideo Kojima is called Metal Gear Survive, and it's a four-person co-op zombie survival game set in an alternate timeline. Seriously.
Hardcore fans of the franchise, as you might expect, aren't happy. Rather than release a new, proper entry in the series, a remastered version of an older game or the sorely-missing third chapter from Metal Gear Solid V that got left on the cutting-room floor, Konami instead decides to create a spin-off that has almost nothing to do with actual Metal Gear.
The reality, however, is that fans of the series haven't been happy ever since word got out about how Konami treated Kojima prior to his departure from the company. That being said, recent moves by Konami have only served to infuriate fans even further. First, it was Metal Gear Solid 3 pachinko, and now, it's Metal Gear Survive.
So, how are fans expressing their outrage? The only way they can in the year 2016: by mass-disliking trailers on YouTube. As of writing, the most-viewed trailer for Metal Gear Survive comes via IGN's YouTube channel, where the reveal trailer sports more than 300,000 views. However, look underneath the total number of views, and you'll see the video's "like" versus "dislike" ratio. More than 28,000 fans have downvoted the video, compared with a mere 4,000 who have upvoted it.
Then, there are the comments. Fans are angry, upset and confused. Some are even a little optimistic.
"What the hell did I just watch?" writes on commenter, while another writes "You can't just call it a Metal Gear game only because you put Snake in your trailer for like 7 seconds."
It's a similar scenario to the mass-dislikes received on YouTube by the reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Fans upset about the franchise's continued focus on sci-fi and the exclusivity of Modern Warfare Remastered to expensive special editions of Infinite Warfare caused the trailer to become the most-disliked video in YouTube history.
More than a few people in the comments of the Metal Gear Survive trailer say they hope the trailer receives even more dislikes than Infinite Warfare, but that seems unlikely, given Metal Gear's much smaller fanbase. That being said, Konami has to be aware of just how much disdain the majority of Metal Gear fans have for the company. At this rate, it doesn't appear that Konami will be winning back those fans anytime soon.
