Metal Gear Publisher Konami: Mobile Is Now Our Main Platform
Corporation will "pursue mobile games aggressively."
A key executive at Konami has said the company will "pursue mobile games aggressively" going forward, and that smartphones will be considered as its "main platform."
Speaking to Nikkei, as translated by a user on gaming forum NeoGAF, Konami company president Hideki Hayakawa said the future of gaming is in mobile.
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"Our main platforms will be mobiles," he began. "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.
"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."
In recent Konami financial reports Konami highlighted free-to-play design driven games as key areas of success for the company. Hayakawa said this strategy would be a key focus going forward.
"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,'" he said.
"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."
It's important to note that Hayakawa was being interviewed for a business focused publication and, as such, it is in his interest to buoy the area of his company's operation that has shown to be the most successful in Japan.
Additionally, the Japanese market has already largely shifted to be mobile-oriented, with even the biggest console game developers creating experiences tailored for mobile devices, as evidenced by Nintendo's recent move towards the market.
Nintendo's entered into a deal with the global mobile games publisher DeNA to create "new gaming applications featuring Nintendo IP, which [both companies] will develop specifically for smart devices."
In previous earnings reports, Konami has mentioned its intention to expand its mobile game operation multiple times. Although Hayakawa's latest quotes aren't a surprising new statement of intentions, they do serve as the most direct example of Konami's diminishing interest in consoles.
Elsewhere in the interview, Hayakawa said the company hopes "that our overseas games such as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Winning Eleven continue to do well, but we are always thinking about how to push our franchises onto mobile there too."
It is expected that Metal Gear maestro Hideo Kojima will leave Konami when the latest entry in the series is out.
Konami has removed the Kojima Productions logo from official artwork for The Phantom Pain and Ground Zeroes, as well as references to titles being "A Hideo Kojima Game" from marketing material.
The Kojima Productions logo was also removed from the Silent Hills/P.T. website, before Silent Hills was outright cancelled.
Read GameSpot's The State of Konami feature for a detailed exploration of the current state of the company.
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