I don't know what exactly happened within Konami, and I doubt we'll ever know, but there is some bad blood between the company and Hideo Kojima, one of their best developers who is most famous for the Metal Gear Series. For goodness sake they didn't even let the man participate in the Video Game Awards that happened recently despite his game being one of the nominees.
Finally, after a lot of radio silence it seems that Kojima has now officially left Konami and is is looking forward to making a new studio along with the rest of the people that were let go.
The source article is in Japanese but luckily a NeoGaf member by the name of Zefah was kind enough to translate it for everyone. The full post is as follows:
"Kojima Hideo, a famous video game creator known for the Metal Gear series has left Konami Digital Entertainment as of December 15th. He will form a new company where he will continue developing video games, with plans to release on platforms such as Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE)'s PlayStation.
He is forming the new company with people who worked under him at Konami. The rights to the Metal Gear series, for which he is most known, remain at Konami, so he will begin working on an all new title. Final negotiations with SCE are underway for this new game to debut on PlayStation.
Kojima is a world famous video game developer on the same level as Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario. He is highly praised for his elaborate stories and use of movie techniques to create impressive visual imagery. Metal Gear Solid V was released this September and became a massive hit, selling over 5 million copies around the world."
Many websites have reported that he is currently in the middle of talks with Sony in order to start up a studio under them, this is not true, he is simply talking with them in order to negotiate a PS release for his new game. I wouldn't judge them harshly though, translations are notoriously context specific and given that I doubt even 1% of these websites know Japanese they probably sourced the story the same way I did, from a translation.
[UPDATE]: As it so turns out Kojima is indeed making a new franchise in collaboration with Sony as you can see in the announcement video embedded below. I'm loving the irony here but, as I said, translations are extremely context sensitive and until the video came out no one could've known for sure. Also, while the game will be console exclusive to the PS4 it will come to the PC as well!
That aside, I'm actually glad Kojima is finally free from Konami because it was clear for a very long time now that their arrangement was no longer functioning. Its just a shame their feud spilled over in to MGS V which while still a good game, feels very unfinished in some areas, especially the later parts of the story.
On a positive note, Kojima did mention before that he would love to do something else after working on MGS for so long and now he has the best excuse in the world, he literally cannot work on MGS anymore. Now the only question remains, in what direction will he take this as of yet unknown game?
