Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, games, Konami, Metal Gear, metal gear solid, metal gear solid 5, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, Metal Gear Solid V, Metal gear solid V: the Phantom Pain, video games

A Possible Explanation For The Kojima And Konami Split Has Surfaced

The split between Konami and Hideo Kojima continues to be one of the big stories of the year in gaming. It has been splashed across websites since the news started in March, and continues to barrel on. Yet, we still know very little about the actual specifics of the rift.

Well, here is some possible incite from the Codec podcast (via Destructoid) about the situation. Host Clayton Daley claims to have sat in on an Interview between Metal Gear Central and Metal Gear Composer Rika Muranaka. In the interview they claim that Rika talked quite openly about the split and said it was down to Kojima wanting to perfect too much and Konami getting displeased with the time and money the game was eating up. Here is the podcast. The explanation starts at about 1:42:00.

Also Reddit user avirdi123 has transcribed the exchange too:

The main reason for the falling out, at least in her opinion, is that Kojima gets paid a salary, and doesn't make any profit share on the game. He gets paid a certain amount no matter what, and he was spending so much money and delaying the project, and adding all these features and making sure the game was the biggest and best thing it could be, and Konami was unhappy with that because [delaying] has no effect on him. He was spending the budget on this and that and upgrading the Fox Engine and then delaying further because the engine wasn't ready, and Konami wasn't happy with that because he gets his salary and he takes a more traditional "Japanese man" approach by not taking a profit share. So in doing that, he gets a little more than a game creator would but doesn't take bonuses from the game selling well…

In her eyes, Kojima's a fantastic creator, and probably the best creator of his time, but he doesn't have a strong business sense like Konami would like him to have. Where instead of, for example, cutting corners by lowering foliage resolution, he wants to make sure everything looks as good and polished as possible. She said they paid for her to write 30-40 songs that ended up not being used, and he'd tell her to write another one, then another one, then another one, because he settles for what he likes and has a good mind for what people want to see and what people want to hear…

She's worked directly with Kojima for the music before so she does have some insight, and personally believes that the music has suffered in MGSV because she's not a part of it, because they couldn't afford her. So instead of paying her to go to all these people and recruit them for the music, they chose to remove her from the equation and go to the people directly."

Again, this isn't verified, but it all makes sense in the grand scheme of things. It is more or less what I and many others suspected had happened. A difficult to manage auteur and a stringent company going head to head and clashing. As I suspected, it seems there is blame on both parties here, but everything Konami have done up until this point in terms of handling the situation has been nothing short of awful. Erasing a creator from their own work is pretty heinous.

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