Kojima vs Konami Explained | Past Mortem [SSFF]

welcome to past mortem a post-mortem of past events in this episode we break down and explore one of 2015's craziest stories and what I like to call the Battle of Kagame the bitter breakup of Hideo Kojima and Konami in this corner we have the man in the annals of video games if you carry the stature of one Hideo Kojima video game auteur mogul genius his games are among the few that feature his name on the cover and those iconic glasses were actually his own personal brand I would say he's the Kim Kardashian of video games except Kim Kardashian is already the Kim Kardashian of video games his ascension to such a lofty status is all the more impressive because this is a guy who started working and making games for Konami in 1986 a time when many companies didn't credit devs because they were afraid of their talent being poached by other companies for example I spent my childhood wondering the true identities of Yuki chance Poppa and fish man though Konami actually seemed pretty good about crediting their workers but anyway through a string of hits like snatcher policenauts and of course the massively successful Metal Gear Solid games Kojima became Konami s go-to guy in their digital entertainment division his production company made 2010's lords of Shadow into the best-selling Castlevania game of all time and he had recently been given the keys to Silent Hill after the middling downpour and a disastrous HD collection snow coincidence the Konami Digital Entertainment reports Metal Gear sales as its own category a man of many accomplishments though the vindictive way Konami turned its back on him over the recent Metal Gear Solid fives expensive grueling and drawn-out development is damn near the top and in this corner we have the man Konami has been a giant in the gaming world for decades making its bread-and-butter largely in the arcades and console markets they also run gyms but as one might expect things got a little bit rocky after the global Cession hit in late 2007 he use konami x' digital entertainment divisions net revenue trends according to its financial reports as you can see things sloped downward this spike here was mobile gaming when in fiscal year 2012 titles like Dragon collection helped increase Konami's overall net profits by almost eighty percent we're not exactly sure why these two big dips happen in the following years since Konami Digital removed segmented profit information from their financial reports possibly they were hiding something we can't prove it but we think these dips were due to mgs 5 s production cost which was reportedly 80 million dollars either way console games needed to start pulling their weight the divisions highest sales in the last 5 years we're in fiscal year 2009 when mgs4 dropped the surefire hit mgs 5 was still a ways away and mobile games had already proven integral to Konami bottom line in March 2014 ground zeroes the prologue to mgs 5 was released allegedly Hideo Kojima's hand was forced by Konami because they needed to ship something to make the money in the console market bought Dicky's Live was an awkward move Metal Gear fans to get a taste of that new mgs goodness but the asking price of 30 bucks was pretty steep what some saw as a glorified demo this seems to hint at the tension and bad blood that was to come but I doubt that internal tensions had come to a head just yet since we still got the surprise release of PT literally playable teaser revealed to be the announcement for silent Hills a few months later in August 2014 this entry into the popular but commercially troubled Silent Hill franchise was slated to be co-directed by Hideo Kojima and acclaimed horror and fantasy filmmaker Guillermo del Toro it promised to be a return to form the series had arguably not seen since the PlayStation 2 era to console fans things were looking on the up-and-up this pretty much brings us to 2015 March 4th more specifically Konami quietly posted a new corporate structure to go live on April 1st which included a new president of Konami digital entertainment division Hideki Hayakawa the former executive producer for the mobile smash hit dragon collection this and a conspicuously unlisted Kojima among the top brass pointed to Konami changing directions from his previous console gaming focus though no one really noticed at the time a leaked video on IGN Italia on this day also led Konami to confirm the official release date of Metal Gear Solid 5 as September 1st in the video Kojima says this would be his final Metal Gear game a statement no one took seriously because this is something he had said approximately a million times before on March 16th Kojima tweeted this which seemed cryptic again everything seemed fine and dandy until a couple days later on March 19th when the truth could no longer be kept secret a few heroic souls on reddit broke the story with these troubling facts key people at Konami had jumped ship Kojima's name and production company had suddenly vanished from all mgs 5 branding a new mgs Twitter account was created and Kojima Studios was renamed Konami Los Angeles Studios while no one seemed to notice the corporate restructuring announcement at the time they sure did now and people would look into Konami for answers how could you just get rid of your Star developer on that day Konami followed up with a typical corporate non statement to video game or comm quote Konami Digital Entertainment including mr. Kojima will continue to develop and support Metal Gear products please look forward to future announcements still on the 19th we get some more juicy deets thanks to a gay spot in saturd the report reveals that due to quote power struggles Konami has revised their contract with Kojima studios they reportedly took away the team's internet and phone access restricted their abilities to promote new games and worse reduced Kojima production employees to contractors scheduled to leave in December in response Konami PR went into overdrive the next day releasing a joint statement with Kojima and an interview with Japanese publication game spark these tidbits revealed that while Kojima will finish mgs 5 the company was hiring for a new director for future Metal Gear games for the record these job postings are still up as of the making of this video the interview also confirmed that Kojima Productions internet had indeed been taken away outrage kept building and on March 25th we get another official statement from Konami Twitter basically they apologize for all the concern that caused and again reassured the fans that yes Hideo Kojima will still make Metal Gear Solid 5 things settled down for a month after that until Konami decided to really burn some bridges amid rumors of cancellation Konami announced on April 25th that the playable teaser for silent Hills will be removed from PlayStation Network before officially announcing the game's cancellation on the 27th we're still in an almost unprecedented move Konami completely scrubbed PT off its servers on May 5th now it's important to note that things are removed from PlayStation Network all the time but by completely deleting PT Konami eliminated the option for new downloads only those with PT still physically on their hard drive can play it this created a boom market for use PlayStation 4 is loaded with PT a similar boom happened with mobile mega hit flappy bird and in both cases eBay removed all such auctions however it would appear things have gone lacks as we had no trouble finding auctions as of producing this video on a side note this is unfortunately Guillermo del Toro's second failed attempt to make a video game it was very vocally disappointed by the news poor guy he just was to make a video game on May 29th Japanese publication Nikkei released an interview with Konami Digital entertainments new president Hideki Hayakawa that confirms Konami --zz intentions towards a quote mobile first focus which basically comes down to a desire to change their business towards intangibles mobile games DLC in-app purchases think special Christmas elf but for Big Boss Hayakawa also revealed the reason for the recent corporate restructure which was to speed up production by quote making clear distinctions between management and creative roles apparently Konami used to be divided into teams with creatives also in charge of management duties so Hayakawa basically thought up a way to add more suits into a video game company which is pretty interesting when you consider the next bit of news a few months later on August 8th news broke again from Nikkei revealing that things that Konami have turned downright Orwellian staffs lunch breaks are monitored and those out for too long have their names announced throughout the company as a form of public shaming cameras have been installed to watch employee movements developers thought redundant or in need of punishment are transferred to work menial labor in one case a former employee announced on Facebook that they had a new job all the employees who like the post were reportedly moved to different positions concern and speculation the konami had become a mere shadow of its former self was all but confirmed with the article near as we could tell at the time of producing this video konami has made no comment concerning the articles accusations September first saw the console release of Metal Gear Solid 5 the phantom pain to critical success it made an estimated one hundred and seventy nine million dollars on its first day and reportedly sold three million units in the first few days but it was estimated by Forbes that they needed to sell at least two million more units just to recoup total expenses no news about Kojima surfaced until October 19th when pictures of a supposed October 9th farewell party leaked to The New Yorker perplexingly Konami released a statement the next day claiming that Kojima was just on vacation things were basically quiet after that until everything came to a head in December on December 3rd mgs 5 was awarded best action-adventure game at the game Awards however lead voice actor Kiefer Sutherland accepted instead of Kojima immediately following Sutherlands acceptance Jeff Keeley the show's producer explained that Kojima was invited but was contractually prohibited by Konami from attending anger economies scorched-earth approach was reaching a fever pitch two weeks later on December 15th DK announced the Kojima's contract with Konami was officially over the very next day Kojima fans finally got some good news in the form of a partnership with Sony doll look how cute they are they're so nervous understanding the need for a fresh start after leaving Konami and Kojima Productions Kojima announced a brand spanking new studio name Kojima Productions complete with an awesome spaceman skull logo he says he's going to continue making console games but he hopes to expand into an entertainment Empire lastly on another good note on January 5th it was announced that Kojima would be the recipient of dices 20 tene Hall of Fame Award the presenter was revealed to be his once and brief silent hill's collaborator Guillermo del Toro it's also nice to see Kojima able to post freely on social media again January saw lots of cute pics of him going on a whirlwind tech tour with lead ps4 architect mark Cerny this may foreshadow what sorts of games Kojima will work on in the future but when also can't deny that this is a great PR opportunity for Sony to capitalize on really it's a win-win Konami on the other hand has not announced many video game releases for 2016 all we could really find were various yugioh releases like yugioh dual links for mobile which sounds like a breakfast sausage and as of yet untitled 3ds and pc games while the recent pachinko machine releases have made some waves it's important to note that these are from Konami szpach Inc o division not their entertainment division so it's not entirely fair to get upset about these releases however as for the Metal Gear Solid franchise on October 5th 2015 news broke that Konami patinka division filed a patent for a big boss logo so look forward to that in the future it's sad to see their intellectual properties go down the drain like this but hey I guess they're making money right and speak of the money it looks like fiscal year 2016 will be a good year for Konami in the sense that their profits won't go down too much in their fiscal year 16 quarter three reports released Friday January 29th they revised their estimated net profit to be 9.5 billion yen down only 4% as for the digital entertainment division they upgraded their projected revenue to be one hundred and twenty six billion yen which would be the divisions best performance since fiscal year 2012 which if you remember was the year of Dragon collection they've also reported at least 6 million units of mgs 5 shipped but for the sake of contrast on the mobile side of things Jiki o powerful pearl baseball has led the charge with 19 million downloads over the last year we won't have the raw profit report for all of fiscal year 2016 until May 2016 so it's hard to say exactly where this will end up shaking out for Konami we're sure this story is far from over but as far as this videos and this brings us to the present but when the next big scoop happens you'll know how it got there this is the first episode of past mortem if there are other topics you'd like us to break down and explain leave a comment below we recently launched another new show called punching weight click the link on the left to watch it we also do reviews and we play terrible games to see if they're really that bad stop skeletons from fighting as a patreon supported show special thanks to all our supporters if you'd like to support the show and see your name here feel free to click the link and pledge what you can thanks for watching for Grace Cramer and Derrick Alexander this is past mortem signing off you

Channel: Stop Skeletons From Fighting

Views: 669,866

Rating: 4.8898139 out of 5

Keywords: hideo kojima, konami, metal gear solid, hvgn, mgsv, mgs, the game awards, phantom pain, ground zeroes, guns of the patriots, jf rey, happy video game nerd, sony, playstation 4, mark cerny, pt, silent hills, p.t., guillermo del toro, video games, snatcher, post mortem, kojima studios

Id: L8pSoKfjsgw

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Endzville]

This is actually a pretty good video, just reporting what we know. For some reason I was expecting "Konami burning as many bridges as possible as they head in a new direction = messed up development of MGSV where KJP are held on a leash", which there's nothing to support, so it was nice to see what, as far as I can tell, is simply all the facts gathered in one place.

[u/SnkRay]

Dat /u/Waylander893 flair in the video ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) .

EDIT; TIL that Konami actually plans on releasing a Big Boss pachinko machine.

[u/[deleted]]

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