IrishNinja
Member
for decades, Konami was easily a top 5 third party dev/publisher, one no viable system wanted to be without: their offerings ranged from coin-op to nearly every console across numerous generations, as well as genres...they even turned licensed games to gold in an era when that was a rare miracle. I seriously doubt any of you could visit GAF's appreciation thread (oddly locked now) and not find at least one titles you'd call a classic.
we've talked a great deal about the fall of japanese development (both in terms of sales and influence) across this gen, but i don't think any one company - even Square, who i find very analogous here - fell nearly as far as Konami did across our last (albeit elongated) generation.
In the space of 10 years, we went from Silent Hill 3 to HD Collection, Dawn of Sorrow to Mirrors of Fate, Suikoden V to Tierkreis, etc (I swear I'm trying not to bog this thread down with MGS4 bashing...). The Rebirth games & some of their better HD collections were literally highlights for me, and given that only a while back, they were on a short list of companies I'd try out a title from day 1 with little prior knowledge...that's a terrible thing, because it cements the notion that their best days are clearly behind them.
Of all the studios with a laundry list of franchises, how did Konami go from simply missing the boat on music games to literally standing on one leg (Kojima's studio)? Not only do they not seem to know much about their former greatness, they seem barely able to make games at all. Many here take the piss with Capcom, but they at least held it down earlier on with stuff like Dead Rising, Lost Planet etc and maintained a revival of fighting games...while Konami became so inept, they ate & shat out Hudson Soft, apparently unable to even manage that properly.
So, what exactly happened? Factors involved that I could come up with:
- The switch to HD development hit (and in some cases, continues to hit) many japanese developers hard - i've read numerous threads on here about mismanagement & archaic ideas about not wanting to share game engines etc, but clearly the increase in budget didn't bring an increase in profit (or more sensibly, revenue streams) required, killing some small studios and leaving others fearful of making the kind've game many on here value, vs the perception of developing for the west (i apologize, as this bit is clearly a thread in itself, and i'm aware i'm vastly oversimplifying)
- Arcades collapsed, but that must've been felt in the PS2/late PS1 gen moreso...they're presumably still eating off of pachinko machines
- Bleeding talent, which ties directly to the first point - but i honestly don't know what teams they still have there, and what those are capable of. Iga seems to be locked in a basement; Murayama's long gone but presumably Sakiyama's still there?
seriously, there has to be more to it than that, because again many japanese devs were hit hard by all 3 of these factors - so why does Konami seem worse off than so many others, even those on their (prior) tier? They still employ thousands of people, and sit on several billion...so what was different about their structure or business model that brought us to the point of their E3 "highlights" of recent years?
