What is going on with Konami? What happened to this company?
Is Konami going to close their gaming division?
Is Konami going to close their gaming division?
Silent hill use to be one of the top triple-A survival horror game. Resident evil focuses more on sci-fi horror, While Silent Hill has a more religious undertone. Silent Hill is focusing on the paranormal and supernatural. It is a psychological survival horror game than an action one.
Japanese pachinko manufacturer Konami will be 50 years old this year, and while they’ve burned all their bridges regarding modern games and the community that supports them, there is still plenty of love for the old days. Might as well lean on it, ’cause it’s all they’ve got.
It’s been one year since Konami became the most reviled company in the gaming community by shutting down nearly all their AAA console projects, firing Hideo Kojima, and cancelling their Silent Hill project so thoroughly that the demo for it ceased to work. Surely they’ve been suffering for their sins since then, right? …..Well.
Despite going through a massive restructuring, and a change in personnel, Konami is still cranking out titles, especially with their franchises that continue to make it money.
Well, Konami had previously made it clear that the Metal Gear/Metal Gear Solid franchise would continue, despite the pending exit of Hideo Kojima, the creator of the franchise, from the company. Well Hideo Kojima made his exit from Konami official earlier this month.
As previously reported earlier this week, Hideo Kojima formed a new partnership to develop a new software title that will be exclusive to PlayStation 4 with the newly formed and independent Kojima Productions. This comes after Kojima’s contract with Konami ended as of December 15. The reason the gaming community might not here more about Kojima’s prolific and controversial split from the publisheris due to contractual reasons. That comes from a new report by The New Yorker. Per the report, Kojima is “contractually forbidden” from discussing the terms of his exit from the game publisher.
One of the biggest news stories throughout this year has been the breakdown and fallout of Konami and Hideo Kojima. The two have fought, reconciled, and yet still haven’t had their full story told. With Metal Gear Solid 5 (the last Metal Gear game Kojima will likely ever work on) a huge success on numerous levels, it has made people wonder if Metal Gear can truly (long term) survive without Kojima.
The fallout between Hideo Kojima and Konami is still being felt to this day, and could be felt for a long time to come in regards to games. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that others in the video game industry are putting in their two cents about the situation. EA COO Peter Moore did an interview with Gamespot and was asked about whether EA would be up for working with Kojima, his response was a bit surprising:
It’s no secret that Konami has been on the blunt end of some fan hate recently. From the “removal” of Hideo Kojima from the company, to the reveal that they would be doing more mobile games in the future, and it seems like the company is in a pretty bad place. Apparently though, we don’t know just how bad. A Japanese newspaper did a report on Konami, and freelancer Thomas James got a hold of it and translated a summary for all to read. In the article, it states that not only are things pretty bad for Konami, the company is in nearly unbelievably bad shape.
Just look at a recent post on NeoGAF (via jin115.com) regarding Konami’s future:
Well, they were serious. Mere days after Konami withdrew the Silent Hills demo P.T. from the Playstation Network, they took the unprecedented step of erasing it from the server completely. Anyone who technically owns the demo on their account now and tries to get it again receives an error message instead.