Hideo Kojima's exit from Konami isn't just the end of Metal Gear as we know it. It's the end of the era of big-name directors running the show in Japan.
From all appearances, the groundbreaking director of the influential, often brilliant Metal Gear Solid games will be done with his longtime employer Konami very soon. The publisher says Kojima will stay on to finish his magnum opus Metal Gear Solid V, which ships in September. But Silent Hills---a collaboration with film director Guillermo Del Toro and Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus announced to great fanfare in August---is dead. Looks like Kojima and Konami are splitsville.
Chris Kohler
Editor
Chris Kohler is the editor of Game|Life.
It may not be a stretch to say that there will never be another Kojima, no one creator who holds such sway over a massive big-budget gaming enterprise. It's too expensive, too risky a business to be left up to the creative whims of a single auteur. But that's precisely what the Japanese game business was, for a long time. Kojima's exit just puts a period on it. The era of the Legendary Game Designer producing massive triple-A games at Japanese studios is officially over.
As one of the world's most famous game directors (based entirely on the strength of his signature game series), Kojima had had quite the sweetheart deal going on since Metal Gear Solid struck gold on the original PlayStation. His development company Kojima Productions was created as a Konami subsidiary, operating semi-autonomously. Now the Kojima Productions website redirects to Konami, its Twitter is gone, and its US operation has been renamed Konami Los Angeles.
Most of Japan's most famous game designers already have split from the publishers that made them famous, opening studios of their own. Capcom's powerhouse producers Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil) and Keiji Inafune (Mega Man) are long gone. Tomonobu Itagaki (Ninja Gaiden) is no longer with Koei Tecmo. Castlevania chief Koji Igarashi left Konami last year.
Kojima was the one major holdout, probably because of how Kojima Productions was set up. The games he created there were blockbusters, but they also were (not to understate the case) batshit crazy; Metal Gear was synonymous with elaborate, tangled storylines that took dozens of hours of elaborately produced cinematic scenes to unfold, and even then you weren't quite sure just what had happened.
There was a place for a maverick like Kojima in yesterday's big-budget gaming world, but as releasing these games becomes riskier and riskier, companies need to place surer bets and leave less room for error, and that place gets narrower. When you're only producing one or two of these games per year, can you really leave them in the hands of a single iconoclast?
Square Enix, the company behind the Final Fantasy franchise, is another major Japanese game publisher that, if its recent actions are any indication, has reached this conclusion. In March, it released a demo version of its most notorious bit of vaporware, Final Fantasy XV. (Seriously, if you haven't been following along, this game was announced in 2006.)
Final Fantasy XV, too, previously was the domain of Square Enix's last remaining Big Name Director, Tetsuya Nomura. But after years of development hell, he quit (or was asked to quit) the project and replaced by upstart director Hajime Tabata, whose smaller-scale Final Fantasy games on the largely forgettable Sony PSP platform turned out to be, against all expectations, the best-received series entries of the last decade.
More telling, the tiny slice of Final Fantasy XV that Square Enix released was less of a demo, more of a widespread alpha test. Following its release, Square Enix launched a massive, worldwide survey, asking players to recount in exhaustive detail their experiences with the demo.
What happened next was even more surprising: Tabata shot an 84-minute video in which the survey results, broken down by territory, were dissected and chewed over bit by bit. Then, he announced that Square Enix would be releasing a version 2.0 of the demo, with several substantial gameplay tweaks that incorporate fans' feedback.
It would be difficult to overstate just how profoundly weird this is, after decades of Final Fantasy games coming together in total secrecy in an office in Tokyo before being released fully-formed to the world. But unlike Kojima, who hasn't produced a flop, Final Fantasy's sales and critical reception have been declining sharply over the last couple of console generations.
Square Enix has got the message: There's a disconnect between what its Final Fantasy teams are producing and what players around the world respond to. So it's crowdsourcing the development of XV. It will leave nothing to chance. It's a self-effacing design philosophy, less the Great Director handing down his masterwork and more of a Facebook game, in which something is thrown out there, banged around and tweaked based on the data. (Okay, okay, Final Fantasy ain't FarmVille---yet.)
Granted, this wasn't the perfect way to go about it, since the only way you can get your hands on the demo is to buy Final Fantasy Type-0, the game with which it is included, at full price. So the survey results are from a self-selecting group of people who by definition already purchase Final Fantasy games. But it's a start.
But is it too little, too late? The Japanese triple-A game looks like it's headed towards an extinction event. The new consoles are selling poorly there, while mobile games with pseudo-gambling mechanics explode.
Meanwhile, the console makers are finding that it's a buyer's market out there. Capcom is producing Street Fighter V, but as a PlayStation exclusive produced in partnership with (read: probably bankrolled primarily by) Sony. Nintendo has the survival-horror game Fatal Frame as a Wii U exclusive (and has its publisher Tecmo Koei making Legend of Zelda spinoffs).
To the extent that auteur-driven triple-A games (in Japan and beyond) survive, this is probably how it will happen. The economics are different when you actually make a game console---the game doesn't need to be profitable in and of itself, if it can create a virtuous cycle by which more fans buy your console because of its exclusivity.
But at independent software makers? To the extent they produce massive blockbusters at all, expect them to be designed by committee, crafted to alienate as few people as possible. If you want to be an auteur, you can do it on your own dime.
