Konami (2015-present)
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Konami Holdings Corporation (コナミホールディングス株式会社, Konami Hōrudingusu Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese entertainment conglomerate and video game company. Konami is a producer and distributor of video games, trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. The company has casinos around the world and operates health and physical fitness clubs across Japan.
Why They're a Miserable Little Pile of Garbage Now
- They went from a talented, creative, and friendly game developer who cared about the quality of their games and revolutionized the industry to this day, to a greedy, selfish, evil, and malicious media company that treats their fans with zero respect and has made multiple bad business decisions during the 2010s that has tainted their reputation and legacy amongst gamers alike, thanks to the company being handled very poorly by greedy executives who have no respect for the talented people who work there and instead just want to make money. This has resulted in Konami fans losing all interest in the brand and wishing that they would go bankrupt for their awful behavior, to the point where Konami is now considered the Japanese equivalent to EA, another awful video game company infamous for their poor management and greedy nature and also they stopped making any good games at all since that 2015.
- In fact, many people who used to work at the company have now left because of how the company changed for the worse and to prevent themselves from being mistreated any further.
- Ironically, Konami did make some questionable decisions back in their prime, but at least they were still a likable and amazing game studio and still cared about their franchises and staff, but nowadays that isn't the case since they've become so greedy that the company can't redeem itself unlike Capcom where they managed to recover from the awful business decisions they made during the early 2010's and became a respected game company and saved their reputation from getting worse, something that Konami will never do due to poor management.
- They canceled many highly anticipated titles.
- After Silent Hills was canceled, tensions between Konami and Hideo Kojima rose. While what specifically happened between them hasn't been said publicly, it led to them parting ways.
- While they haven't completely abandoned console and PC gaming, they've shifted their focus towards mobile games and pachinko machines, both of which are inferior to the former for no reason other than that they're cheaper to produce and make lots of money. P.T., a teaser game for Silent Hills, was delisted from the PlayStation store in April 2015, eight months after its release.
- To make gambling legal in Japan, they turned their most beloved franchises into pachinko machines after the titles failed to meet their critical and commercial expectations. For example, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was met with mixed reviews and middling sales. Since then, except for pachinko machines, a Netflix original animated series, the series being represented in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and 35th Anniversary "celebration" NFTs (NFTs that use Ethereum are known to cause harm to the environment as well as frequent scams that led to a decline of popularity and sales), Konami has barely done anything with Castlevania.
- Also, ever since Silent Hills was cancelled, the Silent Hill franchise went dormant for a while until they revealed a Silent Hill-themed pachinko machine. They later announced two new Silent Hill games, with one being an episodic-style game while the other is a reboot of the franchise.
- Something similar happened with Ganbare Goemon (known as Mystical Ninja outside of Japan), which, aside from two pachinko machines, hasn't had a proper entry since Ganbare Goemon: Tōkai Dōchū Ōedo Tengu ri Kaeshi no Maki, which was released for the Nintendo DS back in 2005.
- Even when they do make console games, they have been low-effort, hollow, mostly overpriced ones trying to sell on name recognition alone, not passionately crafted products, the most recent examples, of course, being Metal Gear Survive and Contra: Rogue Corps.
- They treat their employees in abysmal ways. For example, when Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia's sales were poor, Konami demoted Koji Igarashi to a desk job.
- They butchered the PR marketing behind the Silent Hill 2 remake, as they outsourced the game's development to a different game developer who knows very little about the series and decided to change the gameplay from being a survival horror game to an action game a bigger emphasis on combat (something that the Silent Hill games never had), and the decision to release the game the same year as the controversial Silent Hill: The Short Message also made it clear that Konami had gone way too far, thus resulted in critical backlash from fans and made many lose hope in the franchise as of now.
- In fact, the trailer for the remake has received negative reviews thus far for its ugly presentation and the new gameplay system, and considering that Konami is doing this after the cancellation of Silent Hills and the negative reception of the recent installment in the series proves that they still haven't learned from the controversy from 2015 that permanently ruined their reputation, and shows signs that they're never going to improve as a company and will continue to get worse in the proceeding years to come.
- Fortunately, the Silent Hill 2 remake was well-received by critics and gamers.
- They weren't willing to give Hideo Kojima credit for his work to the point where they removed his name and the Kojima Productions logo from the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain box art, banned him from winning at the Game Awards 2015 ceremony and came to pretend like he never worked with them in the first place. In other words, they treated Hideo Kojima, one of the most important people in video game history, like chopped liver. This is very disrespectful and narcissistic and at its finest.
- Even Geoff Keighley, the host of the awards, felt sympathy for Kojima being kicked out and tried to make it up for Kojima by awarding him the Industry Icon Award the following year.
- Many of their mobile games, especially the Android ports, don't have any hacking protection. Unlike other online mobile games, which won't let you connect to their servers using hacked APKs, "hacked" APKs of Konami games can be played online without any negative repercussions. In other words, Konami's purpose on the mobile game market can be easily defeated with this antic, as players will surpass several P2W sessions without paying a single cent.
- They dissolved Hudson Soft in 2012 and have done absolutely nothing with their franchises ever since (except for Bomberman).
- Speaking of Bomberman, Konami was the reason Bomberman: Act Zero was made, not Hudson.
- They are often prone to copyright-claiming videos about their games, even if it's just an unboxing video. The most infamous case of copyright infringement abuse from them is the time when they gave a copyright strike to Super Bunnyhop.
- They don't seem to listen to criticism, regardless of how constructive it is. They deliberately ignore them
- They only care about money now, and it is the reason they've turned their most beloved franchises into pachinko machines and a lot of their games now suffer from microtransactions like Metal Gear Survive.
- In Metal Gear Survive, you either grind a lot or pay $10 to create a new save file.
- They've also begun using NFTs, which are harmful to the environment and are used for scams, as proven when they celebrated Castlevania's 35th anniversary by making Castlevania-themed NFTs, which angered fans of the series and consumers in general.
- Konami also decided to make a Bomberman-themed arcade game that forces the player to pay for more bombs with actual money, which by the way is gambling and ruins the fun of the Bomberman franchise with its multiplayer madness of trying to destroy other opponents by placing bombs and seeing to know who becomes the winner of a certain match, and since Bomberman has had some arcade titles in the past which were created in the 90s, this could come off as an insult to arcade gamers who would want to play the game itself and also to past arcade titles such as Neo Bomberman.
- Similar to Capcom, they shut down some of their subsidiaries, such as Team Silent, to make room for Western developers.
- They ruined their own franchises like Silent Hill (with the cancellation of Silent Hills and the release of The Short Message), Castlevania (with Lords of Shadow 2), Metal Gear (with Survive), and Contra (with Rogue Corps).
- They ignored their other franchises such as, Gradius, Ganbare Goemon, Lethal Enforcers, Sparkster, Twin Bee, AirForce Delta, and Parodius and many others. Most of the IPs mentioned here are dead (outside of pachinko machines).
- Speaking of Parodius it didn't get an actual new game outside of updated rereleases since 1997.
- Also, Sparkster had a mediocre revival in form of Rocket Knight in 2010.
- They royally screwed up the beloved SAW franchise with the releases of Saw and SAW II: Flesh & Blood.
- They don't even know how to publish good games based on television shows, as disastrous games such as Ben 10 Alien Force: The Rise of Hex prove.
- They did a terrible job at promoting Blades of Time, as they only decided to announce the game a whopping three days after it came out! This unsurprisingly caused the game to sell extremely poorly.
- They have taken stances against fan games based on their properties, just like Nintendo did. For example:
- They forced the developers of Shadow Moses, an Unreal Engine 4 remake of Metal Gear Solid, to cancel their game.
- They did the same thing with a remake of the first Castlevania game.
- They've also taken down a fan remake of P.T that was made with Unreal Engine 4, which could've allowed fans to be able to finally play the canceled Silent Hills title since it was unfairly canceled by Konami for zero reasons as mentioned above, which proves how Konami treats their fans in general.
- In an attempt to promote the newly released Link monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, Konami released the infamous Master Rules 4 that essentially force the existing players to use the Link monsters by preventing them from summoning any extra deck monster unless using the limited extra monster zone or using a Link monster to increase the number of the possible extra zone. Three years after protests and players leaving en-masses, Konami removed the restrictions in 2020, with the minor exception of Pendulum and Link Monsters still adhering to the Extra Monster Zones.
- Before this, Konami has also used the ban list to force players to use the new types of monsters they have introduced. With them usually banned any monster from the previous type to promote the new ones.
- Hygiene standards at their official Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments were so poor and bad that they had to institute a mandatory hygiene clause in their rule books and penalize smelly players and players wearing dirty clothes.
- Speaking of which, the Konami Arcade Championship is a complete mess for many reasons:
- The qualification standards are abysmal and they didn't provide travel accommodations to players from North America or Europe.
- Players were given NO PERIOD to warm up, to the point where some Dance Dance Revolution players had to practice on a set of stair handrails from memory we are not joking.
- The tournament structure functions more like qualifying rounds rather than an actual tournament.
- EX scoring is a bad scoring method that encourages players to miss more than they should.
- They gave the Wii U little to no support whatsoever, as all they did was just re-releasing TurboGrafx-16 titles on the Virtual Console, including some of the ones that Hudson Soft made, as they didn't even port any of their original games from the 8th Gen on that system, or didn't even make a game for the console in general, and also did not even release of some of their older games on the Virtual Console, and even made the excuse to say that the install base for the Wii U is too small for the PES series, yet some of the games in that series are released on the Xbox One, which has a smaller install base than the Wii U ever did (save for Latin America), which shows that Konami gave little to no respect for the console whatsoever, which is shameful since they are known to have a good relationship with Nintendo and many of their most iconic games from the 80s and 90s were released on both the NES and SNES, and some of them didn't get re-released on the Virtual Console at all, which is a shame. This is even more heartbreaking when you realize that their support towards many of Nintendo's previous consoles was massive, so seeing that they wouldn't give support towards their next console is very devastating.
- In fact, about 60 games from their original library got re-released on the Wii U, not counting Hudson IPs or games from Naxat Soft on TurboGrafx-16, which have been owned by Konami since when Kaga Electronics liquidated Naxat's game library to multiple companies since December 2015.
- Thankfully, they began coming back to support Nintendo consoles again, by releasing titles on the Nintendo Switch and even reviving the Bomberman franchise with Super Bomberman R as a launch title for the console when it first came out. Their support for the Switch is a bit of a step up from what they did on the Wii U, since unlike what they did on that console, they at least make original games for the Switch and even re-released some of their older titles on the Nintendo eShop too, and also port some games on the Switch too, however, the amount of games they released for the Switch is rather limited when to what they released on their consoles before the Wii U, and some of their original games from the console have recently been ported to other consoles such as Super Bomberman R, which was ported to both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and they even canceled an installment of the Track & Field franchise called Hyper Sports R.
- While arguably the least bad division, BEMANI has made several mistakes in recent years:
- For one, they did a horrible job in localizing Pop'n Music for Western audiences.
- They made Beat'n Groovy which was a really bad rip-off of the beloved game and failed.
- Then they made a complete reboot of Pop'n Music for the Nintendo Wii that completely changed the gameplay of the original series and also failed.
- Because of that, they never bothered to make another Pop'n Music game for North America again after the failure of those two games.
- No localization for Sound Voltex cabinets even when imported meaning that cabinets found in the West still had Japanese text. This can confuse Western players who may not understand Japanese.
- While still great, Dance Dance Revolution has its share of flaws:
- Post-2005 releases (both arcade and home console) are known for having some charts that are off-sync.
- Some charts aren't assigned an appropriate difficulty level, meaning they could be easier or harder than the level given. Endymion, the hardest chart, is one of the worst offenders of this issue as it has a level 19 challenge difficulty when it should be a level 20.
- This issue used to be much worse as the original scale was 1-10 while the Post-Supernova 2 scale was increased to 1-20. Several charts that originally received a level 10 are now translated to difficulty levels 15-19. So at least now it's easier to determine how hard a chart will likely be.
- It has made changes to be more like Stepmania and In the Groove (ITG), all of which are hit or miss, with NGO and Pluto the First being the biggest offenders of this.
- Criteria for charts have become very strict yet expressionless, with mixed results.
- Extra Stages and some options that were once free now require additional credits or an e-amusement pass to access.
- Speaking of which, the e-amusement pass has not been implemented in BEMANI arcade cabinets in Europe, not because Konami doesn't want to implement it, but likely in response to the infamous Article 13 (now known as Article 17). Regardless, there still should be a fix for it.
- Payments for several games were increased, and certain features in some of these games were locked.
- For one, they did a horrible job in localizing Pop'n Music for Western audiences.
- They stopped caring about Frogger, their first successful game in 1981, after the reboots didn't sell well.
- They didn’t even bother to put the game on any of their arcade compilations either, except for Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced on GBA. While the game was re-released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch through Arcade Archives, the music was altered due to multiple licensed anime music used back in the original version, which turns out to be one of the major reasons why Frogger had not too many re-releases in Japan.
- After the end of content updates for eFootball PES 2021 Season Update, Konami revealed eFootball 2022, which is basically a free-to-play instalment in the PES series. However, to make a profit off of it, they will be selling offline modes such as Career Mode as DLC and will have a Match Pass system (which is a copy of Fortnite's battle pass). This revelation angered fans as Konami is now starting to turn PES into a pay-to-win mess, just like that one other game mode that is also pay-to-win....
- eFootball 2022's release on Steam was a disaster, as it became the service's worst-reviewed game at the time, and is considered to be one of the worst games of 2021 alongside Balan Wonderworld and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. A clear case that Konami deliberately tarnished the PES franchise and namesake just to mock their fans.
- Kagemasa Kozuki, the founder and chairman of the company, doesn't do anything about the horrible business practices happening at his own company nor isn't stopping the executives from doing them, as it might be possible that he's supporting them though this just could only be a coincidence at best.
- They decided to make some unnecessary changes to the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1.
- They confirmed that the Switch version will be locked at 30 FPS, despite the games being old for more than a decade at this point.
- They also made a dumb decision to limit the PS4 version to be exclusively digital, as opposed to being physical.
Redeeming Qualities
- Konami used to be good and has a rich history of many top-quality games that can still be enjoyed.
- Despite what they did with Kojima, he thanked them because they're the reason for who he is today.
- They helped to develop a bionic hand based on Big Boss' prosthetic arm.
- To celebrate their 50th anniversary, they released three collections: Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection, Castlevania Anniversary Collection, and Contra Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows. The latter two even include a bonus book explaining some facts about the games.
- They still make great music arcade games under the Bemani brand. It can be argued that Bemani is keeping the little respect left for Konami alive today.
- In the "Miniature console" craze started in 2015 and onward, Konami released the TurboGrafx-16 Mini in 2020, which featured about 50 titles from TurboGrafx-16, SuperGrafx, TurboGrafx-CD / Duo, and even Arcade CD-ROM² games.
- They are finally starting to give some attention to many of their older franchises that they've abandoned for many years, with brand new game compilations and new installments, even if they're not handling them well.
- A notable example is Silent Hill, where they have two new titles, despite receiving negative reviews from fans.
- In other words, the Silent Hill 2 remake really isn't as bad as fans have thought and is a big improvement over the original PS2 version.
- Another example is Rocket Knight, as it's getting a brand new game compilation that's tied with Felix the Cat, which could indicate that a potential new game could be released.
- Speaking of Felix the Cat, they've started to give some attention to the Hudson Soft brand, since the Felix the Cat video game was developed by said studio, which is proof that they haven't completely forgotten about the studio and acknowledge their history.
- There are also rumors that a Metal Gear Solid remake is in the works, which could mean that they're finally bringing the series back to its roots after the disastrous Metal Gear Survive bombed in sales and put the series on a hiatus due to mixed reviews and negative feedback from fans.
- It's later revealed to be Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, which is a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
- They also celebrated Castlevania's 35th anniversary in 2021, which was seen as a miracle by many fans alike, with the Castlevania Advance Collection being released at that time.
- Not only that, but there's also Castlevania Dominus Collection (that has all three DS era Castlevania games, as well as the original and remade versions of Haunted Castle) that came out in September 23, 2024.
- A notable example is Silent Hill, where they have two new titles, despite receiving negative reviews from fans.
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