Konami is charging $70 for a free 2-hour game — and calling it preservation
Konami and Limited Run Games have announced a $70 physical Deluxe edition of Silent Hill: The Short Message — a game that has been free to download on PS5 since January 2024. The first-person horror experience runs about two hours, has pulled in over 4 million PS Store downloads, and never cost a single dollar. Now it comes on disc, wrapped in postcards, a poster, an acrylic keychain, and a numbered certificate of authenticity. Pre-orders open July 10 and close August 9.
Silent Hill: The Short Message — now available as a $70 physical Deluxe edition from Limited Run Games.
The preservation argument
Limited Run Games founder Josh Fairhurst stepped into the predictable social media backlash and framed the release around game preservation, not profit. His reasoning: if Sony ever removes The Short Message from the PS Store, it disappears permanently — exactly what happened to P.T., Hideo Kojima's playable teaser for the since-cancelled Silent Hills. P.T. was pulled from the store in 2015 and has been undownloadable ever since, making surviving copies on old hard drives genuine collector items. Fairhurst's message to critics was blunt: "Don't like it? Don't buy it, but don't say there's no valid reason for the release. P.T. set the precedent a long time ago."
It's a defensible point. Digital storefronts have no legal obligation to keep games available forever, and Sony has already shown it will remove titles without warning. A physical disc is the only format that survives a platform's business decision.
The credibility gap
The problem is who's behind it. Konami's track record with its own franchises makes the "we're doing this for fans" framing a tough sell. The company cancelled Silent Hills, erased P.T., shifted resources toward mobile and pachinko machines for years, and famously parted ways with Kojima under circumstances that remain disputed. Konami exec Motoi Okamoto previously described the free release of The Short Message as R&D; — suggesting a paid follow-up would need combat systems and multiple endings to justify a price tag.
So who actually buys a $70 disc of a free game? Completionists, collectors hedging against a future delisting, and speculators who remember what P.T. copies sell for on eBay. The preservation logic is real. Whether it justifies the price — or whether it's primarily a bet on collector anxiety — is a question Limited Run Games official and Konami are content to leave unanswered.
