Kojima has been the headliner for Konami’s stage show for a long while now. One of the strangest and most revered video games franchise, Metal Gear Solid, has been coming out of Kojima’s brain and published by Konami. The long standing relationship may now be on the rocks, or worse. It started as a series of strange coincidences leading up to the release of the highly anticipated Metal gear Solid V later this year. Kojima Productions, a developer under the Konami umbrella, suddenly saw a series of re-branding. Websites no longer say Kojima but instead just focus on Metal Gear, twitter accounts called “METAL GEAR OFFICIAL” are your new source of Metal Gear news away from Kojima’s twitter account. Kojima’s name was gone from the company’s executive list and some of Kojima’s own tweets have seemed somewhat strange or cryptic (not that that’s new).
And then things got stranger. According to a source talking to Gamespot, a ‘power struggle’ between Konami and Kojima Productions has resulted in some hot heads. The source states that some or all of Kojima Productions have limited access to corporate emails and phones. In addition a lot of the changed the status of senior developers employment to contractors with Konami and not standard employees, and that includes Kojima himself. The source continues to claim the Kojima studio will probably be disbanded after MGS V releases. This falls in line with Kojima Productions LA, the American studio that worked on MGS Online for MGS V, being renamed Konami LA Studio.
Nothing is official and believing anonymous sources and coincidences isn’t always the best idea. But there is certainly something very strange happening between Kojima, Kojima Productions, and Konami. I personally wouldn’t mind seeing what Kojima could do given a new environment and the Metal Gear brand firmly behind him but no one ever likes seeing a group of talented developers, or a talented dev studio, go down like this.
