Konami Moves to Mobile, Microtransactions

As you might be aware, things are a little bit wonky with Konami at the moment. They’ve been acting like dicks something awful, doing such unsightly things as censoring youtube videos, attempting to silence critics, attacking anyone who provokes them even in the slightest… and that’s not neglect to mention the whole mess with P.T, the next Metal Gear Solid game, and ol’ Hideo Kojima. They’ve also delisted themselves from the New York Stock Exchange recently, which has lead people to speculate that maybe they’re in some pretty deep water at the moment.

Well, we won’t know for sure how Komani is doing financially, but now we do have an idea for what it’s future plans are: Mobile!

Yep, I’m scared too.

The company's new CEO, Hideki Hayakawa, got interviewed by Japanese website Nikkei Trendy Net, where he discussed the new direction Konami is going in. His words are… well… here’s a rough translation.

"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. 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."

Well, at least he’s being open with his intentions. It appears his intention is to turn Konami primarily into a mobile-focused company, with microtransactions at the forefront of their earnings.

"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."

So there you have it, one of our scummier triple-A developers is moving into mobile, where ‘scummy’ is the primary business model. The two will be a great fit together. Sadly, it probably means classic IP’s like Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill will be… well… desecrated.

We’ll always have emulators.