Monday, August 3, 2015
Konami: What the Hell is Going On?
So, over the last few months I've been following the events going down at Konami, and in short, I think it's the nail in the coffin for their gaming branch. They fired the director and creator of Metal Gear Solid, their flagship game, Hideo Kojima. Cancelled games, removed credits, and shoddy PR came with letting go of Kojima. At first, relations seemed okay because he is still working on MGSV and seemingly had another project (Silent Hills (P.T) Guillermo Del Toro and Kojima's reboot of the horror franchise) in the works. But, Silent Hills was cancelled and P.T was removed from PSN entirely.
Aside: Why was this bad? It shows that some shady stuff is going on behind the scenes at Konami. The complete removal of a game from a digital download service like PSN shows the power of publishers over the service, too. Essentially, publishers took away the rights of a purchased game (despite being free) and that's kind of a big deal, because like, what if the game had cost money? Shits bad, yo.
Even if you had purchased the game and had it in your library you couldn't play it (if it was downloaded on your PS4, I hope you didn't delete it).
Just recently, though, I think the industry has seen Konami's true colors; they removed Kojima's name entirely from the cover of MGSV even though it is his game, and sources say his name isn't (or won't be) in the credits. Yesterday, a report out of Nikkei (Japanese website) says that employees are treated like prisoners: complete with monitoring lunches, no internet connection, and public shaming. The article says that the less capable devs are getting reassigned to jobs like security guard or janitor.
People, like myself, are wondering what acutally happened between Konami and Kojima. Let's face it though, there's a high chance that Konami wasn't paying Kojima what he needed to make the game he wants to, I guess we'll see in September when MGS drops. Also, there's a small chance that this is just another one of Kojima's publicity stunts, I'm sure that is what we are all hoping for.
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