Briefly: According to The New Yorker, Hideo Kojima’s last day at Konami was Friday, October 9. Kojima’s farewell party was reportedly a “cheerful but also emotional goodbye.” The publication says Kojima’s non-compete extends to sometime in December. For more details on what went down, you should read the piece.
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23 responses to “Report: Hideo Kojima Has Left Konami”
I honestly thought he left prior to the release of MGSV.
Konami, now your failure is COMPLETE…
No but seriously, they have lost so much more than he has out of all this, I am quite interested to see what in the future for Kojima-san.
He should join up with platinum. He would bring a new kind of crazy, and would complete the “Japanese publishers have no idea” with all of the good ex-capcom staff there.
Also, I liked revengeance.
It probably includes something remarkably similar to Zone of the Enders.
Maybe Tone of the Shmenders.
Hopefully now he can make Silent Hil- I mean that Horror game with Del Toro, I’m sure publishers would be falling all over themselves to throw money at him.
Del Toro has said he never wants to get involved in games again, so it’s unlikely that pairing will happen, sadly.
Didn’t he say the same thing after his project with THQ/Volition fell apart though?
Good point.
While there is no doubt Kojima is a genius, he is reportedly difficult to work with from a corporate point of view – the qualities that allow him to produce such brilliant games do not always gel with the moneymen.
He is ridiculously expensive – his refusal to be held to time constraints or compromise on production elements (e.g. custom mocapping dogs and horses despite there being cheap, high-quality libraries already available) means that it can be difficult for his financial overseers to make the $$$.
I think developers will be cautious when considering him or will seek to put some fairly tight controls on him. Hopefully he’ll find somewhere that’ll let him flex his wings again 🙂
Yeah, as dumb as Konami are for letting him go I think he’ll face a tough time delivering a game that lives up to his reputation. Securing the funding for a new IP, convincing everyone to let him do what he wants at his own pace, convincing the audience to move with him to the new places he wants to go, it’s not impossible but it’s going to be an uphill battle. He’s going to be running into a lot of the same problems that caused him to clash with Konami in the first place only this time he doesn’t have the bargaining chip of being so tightly linked to their flagships they have to say yes.
To me that all depends on who he works for if he chooses to work for somebody else. There are various companies out there that are so big they don’t answer to publishers. He is a perfectionist and is involved with everything that doesn’t like to compromise on what he wants. He also carries significant weight with his name. He is not a nobody and I have no doubt he can come up with an idea and somebody will throw money at him knowing of what they getting. I also doubt he’d submit to a short leash either.
Hell, for all we know he could start his own company and go down the crowd funded route. There would be a large volume of people willing to give him their money for a concept he has.
I think crowd funding would be an absolute disaster for him. I love the guys work but even if he hadn’t been trained for the past few decades to just get Konami to give him more money when he runs out he isn’t what I’d call Kickstarter compatible. Grand visions, perfectionism, a constant pressure to do more of the same while producing brand new genre redefining games every time. He might conquer some of those problems but I think realistically it’d end up playing out worse than Kenji Inafune’s crowdfunding issues. I actually think backers would treat him worse than publishers with less results.
I dunno. I want to see him succeed but he’s no indie developer. He’s got to find himself a publisher with deep, deep pockets, a level of faith in his ability to make games/his creative vision that borders on insanity and a willingness to actually fight him to get the game out. I’ve played plenty of near perfect Hideo Kojima games but I don’t think any of them would have been released without Konami pushing deadlines on him.
Wouldn’t surprise me if a first party publisher i.e. Sony, Nintendo or MS gave him a shot. The kind of prestige exclusive he could make for you would likely sell enough consoles that it wouldn’t matter if the game itself turned a big profit.
Probably too late now, but imagine the buzz Nintendo could generate around the NX if they had an exclusive new Kojima IP at launch?
MS / Sony might be thinking the same for the PS5 / XBox Two (or whatever it’s called) launch.
He has enough money, he can build his own studio, with blackjack and hookers, in fact forget the studio and blackjack.
Fuck you, Konami.
Surely the 2015 buzz phrase
And I rate it a strong chance of defending its title in 2016, too.
It cost $80m to make and made $175m on Day One.
Doesn’t matter how you run your development, that’s a worthwhile investment that’s paying off immensely.
From a shareholder perspective, MGSV is not a worthwhile investment. That $80m (probs closer to 100 with media buys etc) overhead is unacceptable when Puzzle & Dragons or the like does $500m a quarter off of what was presumably a low 7 figures development cost. Not saying I agree with it, but for a modern company focused on growing profits, pachinko machines and mobile games are a far, far stronger bet than AAA console titles.
You’re entirely correct, but I hate that thinking. As you’ve said though, that’s modern business. Corporate greed will ultimately impact the quality of products for the traditional console AAA game audience.
Yep. Even if Konami wasn’t following that trend when it comes to investments you’ve always got to ask yourself if there’s something that would yield better results. An investor doesn’t care if they’re growing corn, renting houses or making games. They care about outgoing money vs incoming money and stability. Double your investment over several? Why would you do that when you could quadruple it elsewhere faster?
It’s why movies like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 that turn a profit are still considered failures. It wasn’t meant to make more than it cost to produce at the box office, it was meant to make a billion dollar property that in turn made everyone involved super ultra rich. The only people who would willingly invest in those sorts of returns want to see the product made. That’s great and I wish more people were like that, but it’s hard to find someone willing to put $80m on the line for the sake of potentially producing some artwork that breaks even. It’s also hard to fault someone for doing using logic to dictate their investments.
“But it’s hard to find someone willing to put $80m on the line for the sake of potentially producing some artwork that breaks even”
There can only be so many Curt Schillings ;). This is a great point though, how many publishers are actually willing to be the money required to pull off Kojima’s projects? TBH I’d love to see him pursue a non AAA project, I’m sure he has ideas that could fit more easily into the indie side of things. Hell he could probably get 3-4mill off of Kickstarter pretty easily.
edit – just saw your above post re: Kickstarter. Hideo probably needs to win the lottery/marry elon musk
Tèam up with swery65 and mikami. Pretty please?