Konami CEO: Mobile is the future of gaming, we out of the AAA game
I think it was long-suspected that Konami was getting out of the AAA game business. Especially since they’ve fired Hideo Kojami and/or banished to him some nether realm. But now the CEO of said company has come out and confirmed it.
Konami CEO: ‘Mobile is where the future of gaming lies’
Konami’s big focus moving forward will be mobile, not AAA games, according to a translated interview with the company’s new CEO Hideki Hayakawa.
The lengthy interview originally ran on Nikkei Trendy Net in Japanese. A NeoGAF user then translated a summary post from another Japanese site, so some of this may have been lost in translation. We continue to ask Konami officials for comment on the company and the state of its games in the wake of Hideo Kojima’s rumored pending departure and the cancellation of Silent Hills. We will update this story if they respond.
According to the article, the company plans to pursue mobile games aggressively and make its main platform mobile.
“Following the pay-as-you-play model of games like Power Pro and Winning Eleven with additional content, our games must move from selling things like ‘items’ to selling things like ‘features,'” according to the translation. “We saw with these games that even people who buy physical games are motivated to buy extra content. The success of Power Pro especially has motivated us to actively push more of our popular series onto mobile than ever before.
“Gaming has spread to a number of platforms, but at the end of the day, the platform that is always closest to us, is mobile. Mobile is where the future of gaming lies.”
Hayakawa added that while they hope that Metal Gear Solid 5 and Winning Eleven continue to do well, “we are always thinking about how to push our franchises onto mobile there too.
“With multiplatform games, there’s really no point in dividing the market into categories anymore. Mobiles will take on the new role of linking the general public to the gaming world.”
polygon.com