![]() “We’ve seen the end of the console-game market in Japan,” he said. 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 20, went even further. Likewise, Konami’s first mobile hit, Dragon Collection, helped boost its profits by almost eighty per cent between 20. 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. And although mobile games are cheap to produce, they can bring significant returns. Today, DeNA and GREE, the two largest mobile-game operators, count more than fifty million registered users between them. “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. 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. It started offering its products as free downloads to consumers, who then paid money for bonus content such as new characters, costumes, and levels. 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. 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. 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. 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. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with such blockbusters, and with the Konami brand itself. 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. 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. 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. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with video-game blockbusters.
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