On Friday, October 9th, Hideo Kojima left the Tokyo offices of Konami, the video-game company where he had worked since 1986, for the last time. The departure ceremony, according to one of the hundred or so guests who attended, and who asked that I not use his name, took place at Kojima Productions, the director’s in-house studio, and was “a rather cheerful but also emotional goodbye.” He said that he did not see Konami’s president, Hideki Hayakawa, or its C.E.O., Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, at the party, but some of Kojima’s colleagues from other studios showed up to pay their respects, as did many of the people who worked on his most recent directorial project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game, which takes place in mid-nineteen-eighties Afghanistan and Zaire, made a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars on its launch day, in September—more than the two highest-grossing films of the year so far (“Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Jurassic World”) combined. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with such blockbusters, and with the Konami brand itself. His impending resignation had been rumored as early as March, but the fact of it remains startling—as much as if Shigeru Miyamoto, the originator of Donkey Kong and the Mario brothers, left Nintendo.
Why would Konami drop its star game maker and shut down his studio? Although work on Phantom Pain is known to have been slower and more expensive than the company planned—a Nikkei report estimated the cost of development at more than eighty million dollars—Kojima’s instinct to hold off the game’s release until he was satisfied with its quality seems, by both critical and commercial standards, sound. As such, some people within the video-game industry contend that his resignation was less a result of personal or artistic differences than of tectonic changes in the business—namely, the move away from console games and toward the domain of the mobile device.
That shift began in 2007, prior to the launch of the iPhone, when the Japanese company GREE began to experiment with a new model for its online games. It started offering its products as free downloads to consumers, who then paid money for bonus content such as new characters, costumes, and levels. According to Serkan Toto, who runs the Tokyo-based consultancy Kantan Games, the so-called free-to-play model gained in popularity after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in 2008, when the cost of television advertising in Japan plummeted. “Companies mass-bought TV spots, contrasting their ‘free games’ with the comparable expense of buying dedicated video-game systems and packaged software,” he told me.
The tactic worked. Today, DeNA and GREE, the two largest mobile-game operators, count more than fifty million registered users between them. And although mobile games are cheap to produce, they can bring significant returns. A financial report from Mixi, the company behind Japan’s current top mobile game, Monster Strike, suggests that the company is expected to make around one and a half billion dollars per year from this single title in Japan alone. Likewise, Konami’s first mobile hit, Dragon Collection, helped boost its profits by almost eighty per cent between 2011 and 2012. As Jordan Amaro, a designer who worked with Kojima on Phantom Pain, put it, “Why risk producing pricey and sophisticated games in an age that favors indulgence in shallow, convenient entertainment?” Ryan Payton, who worked at Konami between 2005 and 2008, went even further. “We’ve seen the end of the console-game market in Japan,” he said. “Even by the time Metal Gear Solid IV shipped, in 2008, I felt like our team was one of just a handful of Japan-based developers who were still fighting to produce blockbuster games.”
Although the mobile-game market may be irresistible to profit-chasing executives, Kojima and other ambitious directors like him have seemed unwilling to squeeze their creative vision into the snug confines of a phone or tablet screen. (Kojima declined to speak with me for the time being, citing a legally binding agreement with his former employer, but when I interviewed him in 2012 he said that his childhood love of cinema has had a profound effect on his art.) There have sometimes been penalties for those who fail to adapt to the changing industry. According to Kotaku’s partial translation of the original Nikkei article, such employees have, in the past, been redeployed to the assembly line at Konami’s pachinko factory or ordered to work as security guards or janitors at the company’s fitness clubs. (Konami did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this and other claims.) Tak Fujii, a former senior producer at Konami, who left the company in 2014 because of ill health, sees no issue with this kind of radical reorganization. “I saw many colleagues unwillingly reassigned,” he said. “Most of them blamed everyone but themselves. But they were not willing to adapt. They were waiting for the golden days to return. All they had left were legendary stories of their products, which are no longer relevant for either the technology or the market.”
Hayakawa, who became president of Konami in April, acknowledged in an interview with Nikkei in May that “mobile is where the future of gaming lies.” The company claims that it is not abandoning console games entirely; as the sales of Phantom Pain attest, big-budget projects can still be profitable. Nevertheless, the effect of the closure of Kojima Productions on other game makers has been significant. “It’s a rare case of a highly successful studio being closed down, so obviously everyone is in a state of shock about it, I think,” Hajime Tabata, the director of Final Fantasy XV, a console game that, like Metal Gear Solid, has been in development for years, at vast cost, told me. “But we believe that we can survive. At least, until the company decides to close us down.” The decline of major console games has been mirrored in smaller, less well-known titles, too. “The Japanese games with which most players are familiar have always been the outliers,” David McCarthy, of the Tokyo-based developer Cybird, told me. “But there has always been a huge iceberg of titles beneath the surface that Western gamers rarely glimpse.… The growing cost of console development, allied to a shrinking domestic market, have made these games increasingly unviable without international success.”
It’s likely that, after Kojima’s non-compete clause expires, in December, he will find a new studio and continue making lavishly produced games. But these future projects will be anomalies in a mobile-dominated Japanese market. Although Western fans may mourn the loss, McCarthy doesn’t share their despondency. “Honestly, I am not so sure that any threat to yet another shouting, shooting game full of American grunts saving democracy from the wiles of dark-skinned terrorists is any great loss to the art,” he said.
