Forum - View topicNEWS: Konami's KPE Reveals Metal Gear Solid Pachi-Slot Game
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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Pachi-slot is where vidya goes to die.
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Zoelius
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Everyone saw this coming, but seeing it come to reality really hurts.
It's like opening your credit card bill statement. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2577 Location: Germany |
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@MetalUpa MGS V is one of the most expensive games of all time and the profit margin are dampened by the 5 year development cycle. GTA can easily afford this kind of devotion but not a B(+) level franchise as MG. I most of all don´t get why they needed a new (and now dead) engine! They even decided to tie the game down by still needing to run on a decade old 360
 . I will also never comprehend where the universal critical praise for the game came from and i am well aware of the less than ideal "review events". It´s 90s all over again... Oh well, 7,5/10.
Kojima may be my favorite game director after Shinji Mikami and i will 100% get his next game but he deserved to be at least demoted, just NOT in the way he was. Konami further funded the entire series + way more and they were never a video-game first company, so feel free to dislike them, but let´s not call them stupid. All hail capitalism. |
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jdnation
Posts: 2107 |
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Konami's PR at the time just stated that they would continue to develop stuff in the Metal Gear and Silent Hill franchises. But PR is PR... After that they only mentioned that they were hiring for another metal gear once MGSV was completed. Silent Hill has since following the 4th game always been outsourced, and Konami, aside from initially asking Kojima to handle it had shown no interest in internally developing Silent Hill titles. More likely unless Climax or some other studio return to them to make another entry, I doubt you'll see any more aside from pachinko, and of course something that fits in with their new 'Mobile First' strategy towards game development. I wouldn't hold my breath. If Book of Memories is anything to go by, it'll likely only be done in such a way that it's cheap, made for mobiles and monetizable with probably a forced online focus like how they ruined MGSV. Only then they may decide to port it to consoles.
This is actually misleading... for one we don't actually know what the costs were other than rumor. Kojima himself has said he's never gone over budget and everything he's done has been within what was agreed to. MGSV's main development costs were associated with the FOX Engine, which was to be a company-wide development toolset for every Konami title scaling for both PC, Consoles and Mobile and there was even the rumors of allowing third party usage. Comparing what Kojima's team achieved with their budget and seeing the problems Square Enix and Capcom were having with their own internal tools failing, Konami got set up for a bargain. FOX Engine was initially supposed to debut with RISING. But the team put in charge was not experienced and the game was cancelled, then outsourced to Platinum Games who used their own tools. Within those costs, Konami put out Pro Evolution Soccer games on the engine including the Ground Zeroes prologue and The Phantom Pain, both of which were profitable, and not to mention the P.T. demo to drive interest in the next FOX Engine game Silent Hills. From Konami's own financials, MGSV Phantom Pain alone was a big commercial success, and that's not including the profits they already brought in from Ground Zeroes and Pro Evo.
As explained above, they needed an internal Engine that was company-wide for multiple titles and scalable for both console and mobile development to make things more modern and efficient which would actually save them significant costs moving on. But this was greenlit during a time when Konami was actually planning to get more invested in console gaming before the recent 180 that is now focused on gambling machines and mobile. The Engine's tech will likely still be used internally within Konami, they just won't bother telling you it's 'FOX' anymore nor carrying on any of Kojima's branding.
Yeah, but considering the time they began production 360 and PS3 were current gen, had much bigger install bases and 360 was the dominant console in North America which is Metal Gear's biggest market. The multiplatform nature of the game was also part of the design process for the FOX Engine which was to be scalable in nature allowing smooth transitions between generations into the future and also catering towards mobile.
We still don't really know what occurred behind the scenes so I don't know why you would pin this on Kojima especially in light of what we know about Konami's treatment of their own developers and employees. From Kojima's own words he worked and delivered to what Konami and he had already agreed to at the time the FOX Engine and MGSV were green-lit. There were some bumps along the way with RISING, and the lengthy dev time of MGSV which Kojima sort to go around by releasing Ground Zeroes early. There was no way Kojima could've just begun lengthy development on an Engine, conducted research trips, hired talent and even opened a Western branch in LA without Konami's stamp of approval. From what we know there was a last-minute flip-around of Konami's management that decided to kill off the console division compared to growing it as was initially decided several years ago when development of MGS4 was completed and FOX was greenlit and Kojima was even asked to take over the Silent Hill franchise using FOX by the then-president of Konami. But then all of a sudden in 2015 Konami did a complete U-turn and instead of doing the smart thing and slowly phasing out of console development, something occurred where it seems they just decided to take an axe and burn all bridges. This is not the behaviour of competent companies. If anything you'd still want to keep one foot in the console arena, even if you need to lower costs, just in case the new initiative you're embarking on with a larger focus on mobile or gambling fails to deliver. Then if things are working out you maintain your talent and see if you can move them over strategically towards your new focus, always keeping in mind that future circumstances may necessitate or provide some lucrative opportunity to go back or use such talent in new ways. But nope... in the middle of MGSV's post-development, shit hits the fan, Konami's PR doesn't know how to handle it and things go very very badly, precisely the sort of thing you don't want muddying up your messaging so close to a game's completion and release. if anything Konami would've been better served waiting until after the release of MGSV to do anything to Kojima rather than locking him in his office and creating further barriers between him and his team during a critical part of the game's development. Considering everything in context, the larger issue lies with the Konami higher ups here, and not so much Kojima. But it'll probably be years before we learn the real truth. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The very sudden change of direction Konami underwent comes across to me as having a new person in charge who was given a lot of control and influence. I will bet that someone at Konami in a high position stepped down, and in his or her place was a new person whose background is in gambling machines and/or mobile gaming. If such a person is totally disinterested in traditional video gaming, then he or she would want to kill Konami's console/PC division off as quickly as possible to reshape Konami into his or her ideal image. That's what I think happened. This sort of thing happened with the History Channel, for instance, when a new guy took charge and flooded the channel with documentary series about extraterrestrials and conspiracies (with a bunch of history-based shows getting the boot); and it happened with the management at Disneyland when the man who previously ran the Disney Store chain was brought in to oversee new attractions and he covered California Adventure with shops. When you have an alpha personality like this as the new leader, there's a good chance they'll try a destroy-and-rebuild strategy. You are absolutely right in that Konami no longer has anything to fall back on should the gambling machines and mobile games not sell, but it's pretty clear that whoever was responsible for the sudden shift in strategy does not believe that his or her plan will fail. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6267 |
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More like Destroy, Rebuild, Destroy (sans Andrew W.K.) |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Yeah, in more examples I know of than not, the rebuilt company doesn't really work out (like with G4-TechTV, Quiznos, and Motorola), though in some cases, like the Disneyland example above, someone else comes in not long afterwards to clean up the mess. California Adventure has grown by leads and bounds in quality in the years since. (History Channel still exists too, just as a shell of its former self.)
There's also the occasional case where it actually DOES work out, like Samsung shifting from selling food to selling electronics, though you could argue that was a decision made to help the war effort. (Then again, a food supplier can help too.) Big 5 shifting from selling military surplus to sports supplies was definitely a good decision in hindsight though. In most successful cases, a business that wants to do something else will do that something else in addition to what they've always been doing. Pepsi, for instance, owns a bunch of different food companies like Frito-Lay, Quaker, and Gatorade, but it continues to sell its core beverages. Sometimes, they make a transitional period where they slowly remove a product or service line over the course of many years, like Nintendo continuing to sell toys and video games throughout the early 80's, but less and less each year. |
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