Kind of sad since it was such a great story. I can see why Kojima is heading towards movies, his art will be appreciated way more in that medium.
"Great story". Maybe it had well directed cutscenes but it's far from a great story, even comparing it to videogames standard plots.
I think the way Death Stranding is selling in some ways may be similar to Yakuza games. It's got a very dedicated fanbase and they all buy the game at launch which results in the sales dropping hard after the first weeks (or, in Yakuza's case, even after the launch week). Personally I'm surprised how many of my PSN friends played the game in the first week and even now I see usually 2-3 people (out of ~70 I have on my friends list) still playing the game.
Comparing Yakuza games to an Hideo Kojima exclusive Ps4 game funded by Sony after the biggest controversial split in videogame history in recent years and a huge marketing campaign is really unfair.
Death Stranding had everything going for it, it had an absolutely incredible amount of hype surrounding it for all these reasons and yet in the long run it failed.
It failed because despite the Kojima name, the game was judged as not worthy to be played. You know, this is not the Yakuza case where most people don't even know what Yakuza is. In Death Stranding case everyone knew what it was, who directed it, everyone was ready to give it a chance, despite not being a Metal Gear game and yet the word of mouth has been terrible.
By comparison Yakuza games have been slowly increasing in sales only thanks to their quality. They have no name behind them, they have no marketing whatsoever. In this case word of mouth is giving Yakuza more and more relevance. It's quite telling that Yakuza went from almost disappearing in Western market to being dubbed in English and localized in several European languages.