Konami Recently

[Loken]

     I am surprised that there hasn't been a thread about this already! We know that Capcom has been in a spiraling decent into madness and mediocrity for a few years running now (to be fair not everything they have done recently isn't %100 percent crap, they basicly have just alienated large swaths of their fandoms.) Konami and Capcom share the same ultimate fate it seems, but Konami has done it with superhuman speed and ignorance, and completely out of the blue! Konami announced Thursday that they are quitting the console game business and are shifting exclusively to mobile gaming and gambling.  The most shocking part of all of this was that they had two stellar games coming up. Metal Gear Solid V, which looks to me like it will go down as one of the greatest games of all time, and Silent Hills, of P.T. fame, which looked to be one of the finest big budget horror games to be made in a long time. Metal Gear Solid V is still going to be released this coming September, completely polished and so forth, but it is going to be extremely weird to see what is most likely going to be the highest selling console game, and Game of the Year, to be from a publisher who no longer makes console games. Silent Hills will never see the light of day dispite soaring media coverage and insane hype, unless it is Might Number 9'ed. 

      Silent Hills had a trailer release in either November or December and this decision seems to have been made when it became clear that Hideo Kojima was being forced out of the company in March of this years. So will incredible success in front of them Konami for whatever reason decided within four months to quit the console business. Was this Kojima's fault? Some kind of nightmare falling out that convinced Konami's CEO to make this change? I think it goes back to Inafune's old gripe. Freedom of creativity. Kojima seemed to have unlimited creative freedom to make his games, both in story and technical aspects. I used to point to how Konami treated Kojima as the antithesis of Capcom and it's dev treatment. It seems to me that Konmai's CEO decided that the significant investment that Kojima required for his cutting edge games was not worth it. I imagine he thought to himself that if Kojima just made a half-hearted game and slapped the MGS logo on it it would sell just as many copies as the very expensive MGSV. In truth it probably would still sell millions. Konami could make a quick buck that way. Companies like Ubisoft, Activision, and the bunch are making a ton of money milking their franchises and releasing rushed games with little creativity or effort. They make millions despite not being nearly as good as the original games were. Now they don't sell as many copies, but they make more money in the end, thus justifying this crap tactic. Eventually these games are just going to collapse like Guitar Hero but today's corporate leaders are short-sighted and really don't have a vision of their companies after their tenure. 

      Konami, being a Japanese company, has mostly skipped this step and have done something different, but similar. In Japan console gaming has basicly hit rock bottom and mobile games are king. The most profitable course the Konami Boss sees is to make shit cell phone games where everything is trapped behind a pay wall. Get ready for your MGS and Castlevania Farmville games designed to milk money from sad people. It really is the death of Konami and they don't see it. I really doubt they will find much success here. It truly is a pity because they were on track to greatness as they were.

     Now there are alot of people who think this is just one of Kojima's hoaxes. I really wish it was true, and there is some evidence of it, but all of this really seems to be far too serious and official to be a marketing tactic. If it is it will be one of the most insane things to ever happen in the game industry. If you would like more details on this I can supply them at your request. 

     Fact is though that Konami is actually doing this and one of my top favorite series is now going to be dead essentially. I'm not going to by some mobile Metal Gear pumped out for a quick buck. I imagine that the transition to mobile only gaming is something that Capcom is really considering and it would not surprise me if they did. They have been releasing alot of mobile games and with their bad financial standing I don't know how much longer they will invest in expensive console games. 

[Rockman Striker]

I was really disappointed to hear that Kojima was leaving Konami, I'm a fan of metal gear solid too but it hurts more the fact that they cancelled silent hills, just imagine how creepy, how many weird monsters would come out of the mind of Guillermo del Toro, who was working on the project too, he recently stated that he would no longer try to make games because of this disappointing experience.

Now, Sega is making some good games for mobiles, including even famous Japanese voice actors and composers such as Akira Ishida, which was Megaman Juno's voice, and I like the fact that their games are not like the millions of boring, generic rpgs on the mobile stores, but quiting entirely console gaming is a really bad idea, take a look at Nintendo, they will enter into the mobile gaming industry but still will make game for their consoles, that's a good strategy, even more if their games maintain their quality.

[HF]

First of all, thanks for bringing up this discussion!

As some of you may know, I have been following gaming business trends with Capcom and Konami for quite a while now (being an especially big fan of the latter's games), and I would like to comment on a few things which you have mentioned (and add some of my own thought into it).

May 17, 2015 13:29:02 GMT -5 Loken said:

Konami announced Thursday that they are quitting the console game business and are shifting exclusively to mobile gaming and gambling. 

I would like to mention that Konami Digital Entertainment CEO Hayakawa's statement has translated VERY BADLY to English (again because Konami is terrible with public relations). Based on Japanese sites such as the source Nikkei, his actual statement is "We will be pursuing Mobile aggressively". While a bold statement, this is something that other companies like Bandai Namco and Sega has been doing for quite a while now for their franchises with collaboration with mobile companies like TenCent and DeNA.

As his statement also mentioned "in addition to package releases" (even though it's talking about this from a payment context), I have reason to believe that the real context would translate better to "Using mobile games to reach out to a wider audience, we will make the connection between mobile and console/arcade gaming closer than before", which at the very least is better than openly declaring war on the entire Internet and International gaming audience.

(And Konami can thank me later for making a better English statement than theirs)

The most shocking part of all of this was that they had two stellar games coming up. Metal Gear Solid V, which looks to me like it will go down as one of the greatest games of all time, and Silent Hills, of P.T. fame, which looked to be one of the finest big budget horror games to be made in a long time. Metal Gear Solid V is still going to be released this coming September, completely polished and so forth, but it is going to be extremely weird

Even if Konami were to go exclusive on mobile gaming, I would like to think that they have saved their best for last.
Doesn't make it any less unfortunate though, especially since P.T. was an amazing teaser and great global expectations are had for this title.

Now they don't sell as many copies, but they make more money in the end, thus justifying this crap tactic. Eventually these games are just going to collapse like Guitar Hero but today's corporate leaders are short-sighted and really don't have a vision of their companies after their tenure.

The company's situation can be summed up to being reduced to a "Numbers Game"; in other words, sales figures and skewed KPIs are what drives decisions without resources or effort put into analyzing root causes. One of the main concerns is the poor reception of console franchises such as Silent Hill and ZOE, which had a bad reputation due to poorly delivered ports (especially with the former, as ZOE HD got patched by Hexadrive) and poor game titles released under its name. It is these unfortunate series of failures that makes it easy for an executive decision to reroute company resources to other markets.

Konami, being a Japanese company, has mostly skipped this step and have done something different, but similar. In Japan console gaming has basiclly hit rock bottom 

In Japan, yes. But not quite so for the rest of SE Asia, one of their largest growing markets at the moment.

and mobile games are king.

I see what you did there.

The most profitable course the Konami Boss sees is to make shit cell phone games where everything is trapped behind a pay wall. Get ready for your MGS and Castlevania Farmville games designed to milk money from sad people. It really is the death of Konami and they don't see it. I really doubt they will find much success here. It truly is a pity because they were on track to greatness as they were.

Franchises like Castlevania and even Contra has gone through the Medal Game and Gambling treatment for quite some time now actually, especially in Japan and the States; keeping this in mind, what you mentioned is already mild by comparison.

Also, I should mention that Japanese companies typically work by using the CEO as an accountable public figurehead while the real boss is the one making him say these things (in this case, KONAMI Corp Chairman Kagemasa Kozuki).

Fact is though that Konami is actually doing this and one of my top favorite series is now going to be dead essentially. I'm not going to by some mobile Metal Gear pumped out for a quick buck. I imagine that the transition to mobile only gaming is something that Capcom is really considering and it would not surprise me if they did. They have been releasing alot of mobile games and with their bad financial standing I don't know how much longer they will invest in expensive console games.

As much as I detest the current situation for many reasons, I would like to not jump to conclusions too quickly; even Capcom has begun recovering from their shortcomings in mid-2011~2012. What's to say that Konami wouldn't follow suit in the next few years?

If anyone wants more elaboration on the points I made, please tell me and I'll see what I can do.
HF out!

[Bean]

The short answer to this is that a lot of companies in Japan see that there is the potential for way more money to be had in the mobile market than in the traditional consoles and handhelds. Understand that even under Kojima that all they produced since MGS4 in 2008 was Peace Walker, a prologue, and completely botched up Rising so much that they had to get Platinum to finish it for them.

Way less risk with mobile, and while I certainly don't like their attitude toward fans of series, Konami has been pretty bad for gamers since around the same time that the MML3 thing happened because Igarashi was locked away, Hudson was shut down for no reason after being acquired, and many of their classic franchises were just abruptly put to rest long before Metal Gear Solid 5's bad publicity started.

[satoh]

Consider that most Japanese game companies got into gaming with the exact same logic as they've used to get out of it, or in this case, switch to mobile gaming.

Almost none of the big name companies started making games because they cared about making games. It was just a profitable seeming branch to add to their toaster, motorcycle, and lawn-care sales. (and yes, most of these game companies are better known for those type of products in Japan, Sega especially)

I can't fault their business logic. The money they might lose by alienating one market will be more than matched by the money they'll gain from the much broader, much less picky mobile gaming market.

Mobile games don't even have to be fun and people will buy them. Just like DLC. (not so fun fact: Most DLC is content that was made at the same time as the game, and could have been included, but was saved to sell at a later date instead, as a separate charge which can be almost as much as the game it appends to)

I expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the near future. Consoles are doing poorly, not because of the technology, and honestly not even because of lackluster games, but quite simply because there are too many consoles.

A while back Sega killed their console department because they tried to push a console to compete with everyone else, when it was unfinished. They tried to push a product onto an already saturated market, and it wasn't ready.
They did the same thing with some of their game franchises. Simply made too many too fast. People stopped getting excited about them because they simply couldn't tell the difference anymore.

There are too many consoles now. We hadn't really outlived the last generation of consoles when the newest one came out, but now they're old news.
I myself made the decision that I didn't care about them because I still hadn't fully enjoyed the previous one.
I expect to see consoles fall into a coma for a while. In a few years someone will take note of the fact that NO ONE is making console games anymore, and decide it's a ripe market ready to be exploited.