Konami Enters Its Coffin

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It's come to this. They're actually moving forward with making mobile games with micro-transactions and abandoning console, handheld, and PC gaming.

It's like what's been said. The video game industry is changing and in order for most companies to survive nowadays, they need that Triple A title that can make tons and tons of money that they can push out every year. Having multiple titles that do moderately well in sales isn't cutting it anymore. Games that don't make the money they should are being dropped.

On top of that, Konami has made plenty of mistakes over the years. To name a few, let's see, disbanding Team Silent, looking to western developers to develop their games, and losing Hideo Kojima.

Honestly, I'm split between this. Half of me doesn't want to see them go like this and half of me wants to see them fail miserably.

This is so depressing that I'd rather just go back in time and relive the nostalgia of their glory days. Maybe I'll go play some Turtles In Time (not Re-shelled though).

Such a shame. It looks like we won't be getting any more Castlevania or Metal Gear titles, or Contra, Gradius, or Rocket Knight to name a few. Hopefully someone buys these IPs from them, I don't want these series to wither up and die.

Thinking about it, it would be kinda neat if SNK, Namco, or Capcom acquired the rights, or whoever it is that owns the rights to Treasure's titles nowadays. That would really bring things full-circle.

In all honesty, I dont think something like this happening is THAT bad. A move to mobile doesnt have to end in stupid.

The real question to me is wether or not their game designers can get away from the idiotic trends that pervade the most well-known games on tablets/phones/whatever. Just because alot of publishers and such go for very simplistic things like endless runners and whatever doesnt mean that that's what you HAVE to do to make a good game on there.

For example, shmups. Cave was my favorite developer for the longest time, making games like Dodonpachi and Mushihime-sama. But the arcade scene started to dry up, and the consoles werent enough for them either (they chose the 360... in Japan... Gee, I wonder WHAT went wrong??? Ugh), so they started porting their games to mobile. Both Mushihime-sama and it's sequel Futari recieved the port treatment. Unlike alot of other devs though, they didnt try to simplify things. The games are pretty much unchanged; what you see in videos of the arcade/console versions of the games on Youtube is exactly what you get on mobile. Even with something like Futari's Ultra mode, AKA the single most difficult game ever made, even that is unchanged on there. And it all WORKS. There's nothing wrong with the controls or such as that. I actually found that, to my surprise, the controls were BETTER that way. I'd never had that level of accuracy of movement with any of the console versions regardless of what type of controller I was using. They also ended up actually ADDING new modes to some of these ports (all of these new modes were pretty great, too) without removing anything else. And they came up with something totally new, Dodonpachi Maximum, which I now consider one of my favorite shmups, period. It's that damn good.

I could point out tons of other games in other genres that dont get the "dumbed down for mobile" treatment (such as Siralim), but the problem is that the "mainstream" games are so.... everywhere, that they crowd those out and make them harder to find. Things like the App Store being absolutely terrible just make it worse.

So it all comes down to what kinds of decisions Konami ends up making. They could do things like make another Metroid-ish Castlevania game, with full features and size and no control problems (seriously, platformers work fine on those, though they're a bit cramped as most games are when on phones instead of tablets) and sell those quite nicely if they push them properly.

....or they could do things the dumb corporate way, and utterly destroy what's left of their public image by degrading their designs to meet the typical trends. I'm hoping that one doesnt happen.

They never said they were abandoning consoles, handhelds and PCs.
They did say mobile was their focus going forward with micro transactions and IAP.

Simply what happened was Konami's management appointed a bean counter CEO who serves the shareholders.

The other thing is outside of Metal Gear Solid and PES, Konami's games were commercial failures in both Asia, Americas and the West, with the occasional handheld success.

Add these two reasons with huge costs of HD development and you get today's climate.

You literally need to sell way more than you did on PS2 to breakeven.

There is no guarantee Konami will have success on Mobile!
If all else fails, Konami could divest itself of gaming and focus on it's fitness gyms in Japan (yeah this is the most profitable part of Konami since the early 2000s)

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Right now the most profitable games on the market are Mega selling franchises like Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, EA sports, GTA, Pokemon (though this is mainly due to Pokemon games being relatively inexpensive to make and selling a lot)...
And games like Candy Crush (is the most profitable game ever due IAPs), Kim Kardashian Mobile game (it made over $30M+ it's first week due to people making IAPs and is still making millions for her. It was one of the best opening weeks in gaming history!), and a few others which are mobile games with riddled with micros transactions and IAPs

Though EA, WB, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Sony, Microsoft, Capcom, etc... have made either a small sum that didn't offset the investment into mobile gaming studios or they just out right lost money.

Sega on the other hand makes the majority of it's money from Mobile and PS02 (still SE Asia only), with very little money from the console/PC side (outside of PSO2). This is why Sega is scaling down it's console/PC side.

I'm not surprised. I won't be surprised when Capcom joins them, either

I've said it before and I'll say it again, people are losing interest in videogames...and with how much money they have to put into graphics, and these huge teams they have to pay to work on them, it's just not as profitable anymore. The big guys who are leaving to go independent, I think, might have the right idea.

I dont think it's a loss of interest in games as a whole, but a loss of interest in *major* games as they are now. AKA, the ones everyone knows about.

I know I sure lost interest in the majority of that sort. Lost interest quite awhile ago. Heck, for consoles, I've hardly bought much of anything in the last few months or so; Smash of course, MKX, LBP 3, and recently Destiny. And then Splatoon will be next. ....but that's really it. There's not many others, and in years past, I'd have tons of things to buy. But not anymore. The games are getting more and more shallow, less interesting, less challenging, filled with less content.... so I mostly stopped buying them.

As opposed to games on PC, which I buy *frequently*, probably too frequently, as I often then cant remember what the heck I bought like 2 or 3 days later. The big publishers have lost my interest almost entirely, but the smaller indie guys sure as heck caught it. And after playing so very many indie games, I think I understand WHY some of those game designers are leaving the big publishers to go out on their own, which is because as an independent developer they can make what THEY want to make. And honestly, the games that come out of that idea are just sooooooo much better. To me it's alot like being back in the NES or SNES era, when games had alot of creativity and were very different from one another. As opposed to now, where most FPS games for instance are trying to all be CoD, or stuff like that. Yeah, there's the occaisional exception with games that actually are trying to be unique even among the major devs, but they're getting alot more rare now than they used to be.

At some point, the main part of the industry may hit another big crash, entirely because greedy idiots have shoved a variety of damn stupid trends and concepts at everyone and have stuck with them despite so many players hating them for it. As usual, the corporate idiots dont *really* think about things before they do it.

Or at least, that's my own view on it, others may disagree. For the most part, I dont actually CARE much. The big guys can do... whatever the heck damn stupid thing they want. I'll stick to all the awesome stuff I've been buying way too much of, thanks.

Capcom was one of the first. They ended up scaling back their mobile division and output when it didn't do well.
They've since rebalanced their company focusing on consoles, PC, handhelds and mobile.

Mobile is one of the hardest markets to crack and be profitable in.

iOS users don't want to pay more than a dollar for most games and apps. They will gladly pay for micro transactions and IAPs instead of eating the costs up front.

Android users pirate everything literally!

Capcom makes a big chunk of its profits off of 3DS and Wii U including the eShop. The other big chunk comes from Xbox and PS. They do get a nice tidy profit from Mobil and PC.

Man, I miss the days when Kojima asked to put Snake in Brawl like a tried-and-true man.

Also Twinbee is love, Twinbee is life.

He only asked for Snake to be in Brawl, to shut his son up who was constantly pestering him over it.

Wrong....Kojima wanted Snake to be in Melee but it was too far in development to add him in, thus his inclusion in Brawl. Similarly, the same dilemma occurred with Mega Man as he was initially supposed to appear in Brawl but timing conflicted badly enough that he was unable to be added until work began on the Wii U & 3DS games.

Hmm....you know, Kojima being essentially a free agent now means Nintendo could ( and by could I mean should ) snatch him up for at least 1 or 2 games. I'd love to see what Kojima and Nintendo can do together without the Metal Gear franchise ( lest you forget, the reason Twin Snakes has never been ported from Gamecube is that Nintendo and Silicon Knights co-developed the game and thus own certain aspects of it ). In fact, the only other games I can even think of that Kojima made outside Metal Gear are the Boktai series and the cult classic Sega CD game Snatcher...so I'd love to see Nintendo release a new IP created by Hideo Kojima

When I said "join them", I meant "in a coffin".



I don't much care for most of the Metal Gear games, but Snatcher was awesome. One of these days I need to get around to playing the "sequel", Policenauts. I've already got it patched and burned.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about Policenauts.....

You are wrong.

Capcom didn't bother to go through the process that Nintendo has for 3rd party characters.
They just shouted publicly that they wanted Mega Man in Brawl and demand that Nintendo put him in.
Though Sakurai says they never bothered to start the process with Brawl.

From the mouth of Kojima:


Kojima also doens't want to be associated with Nintendo and their "image", hence why nearly all of Konami's games including the main Metal Gear Solid series has skipped every Nintendo system since SNES.
(Twin Snakes is not canonical according to Kojima)
This is why Konami and Kojima decided not to have Snake in Smash 4

Kojima has made the following series:
Metal Gear Solid
Silent Hill
Zone of the Enders
Other one off games and minor series than haven't come state side.

Kojima's Silent Hills doesn't count, seeing as it's been canceled. And where the heck do you keep finding these quotes and stuff?

It's the internet. You can learn ANYTHING on the internet. It is a magical place that just happens to be filled with utterly insane trolls.

Actually he made the PS2 Silent Hill games and gave advice for the ill fated Wii game.
The reboot was the one that was canceled.

You know you can find anything via a search engine if you know what you are looking for...