Konami is no one’s favorite company right now. After a very messy split with Hideo Kojima, PT has been taken down from digital stores, Silent Hills has been cancelled and the future of Metal Gear Solid is uncertain. But now there might be a reason that Konami doesn’t seem bothered that it’s killing all its beloved console franchises.
Mobile games are the future, of course!
Konami’s new CEO Hideki Hayakawa gave a lengthy interview to Nikkei Trendy Net where he laid out how the company’s new mission going forward would be an unrelenting focus on mobile. His statement has been translated by NeoGAF, and it’s worth reading in its entirety.
"We will pursue mobile games aggressively. Our main platform will be mobiles. 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."
"We hope that our overseas games such as MGSV and Winning Eleven continue to do well, but 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."
For a long while now, I’ve been one of the biggest proponent of the idea that mobile games are not killing traditional gaming. The two markets are both growing, and even if mobile is perhaps growing faster, the two seem content to co-exist with one another.
But if there is a way mobile games are doing harm to core games, Konami just summed it up perfectly here.
This is a company once responsible for some of the best console games ever made. Hell, they’re still making pretty good ones every so often. But the call of mobile is too strong, where cheap, often uncreative (or outright stolen) games can make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a day. Konami views mobile as “the future of gaming” when really it’s just getting out of one industry and sliding into another where they think they'll make more money for less effort.
Konami’s statement reads like an Onion article or South Park episode. “Our games must move from selling things like "items" to selling things like "features,” they say. Microtransactions for gear aren’t enough, it seems, and Konami is referring to the notion that certain parts of gameplay must be locked behind paywalls. It might even be a reference to the “feature” of being allowed to play a game by paying to skip a wait timer, a famous mobile money-extracting tactic that has made a king of Candy Crush for years now. Konami even goes on to suggest that one of the premiere console experiences of all time, Metal Gear Solid, could see its future relegated to the Apple and Google app stores.
I’m just going to say it. Mobile gaming is a cesspool.
That’s overly harsh, and overly broad, and may offend some hard-working, creative mobile devs out there. But the fact remains that for everyone one of them, there are ten untalented hacks slapping together garbage and throwing it onto the app store. And if someone makes a successful game? That number increases a hundred-fold, and the market will drown in countless shovelware games trying to imitate it.
Mobile monetization is no better. There are a few games that manage to find a good balance between free-to-play and microtransactions, or just charge a reasonable up-front price, but they’re few and far between. The fact remains that every mobile game I’ve ever played would have been better without items or “features” hidden behind paywalls. But as the public pursues “free” relentlessly, that’s lead to everyone paying more if they want a not-crap game experience through microtransactions.
The fact that mobile games are hugely profitable is not some testament to their quality. It’s just because many have tapped into a primal part of the human brain that becomes addicted to small rewards. So many mobile games are now little more than slightly-more-involved slot machines. Some, like Game of War which literally features a slot machine to dole out items and bonuses, aren’t even more than that. It’s no wonder that gambling-focused Konami, who makes a fortune from Pachinko machines, thinks this is “the future.”
If this is the future, it’s a dystopian one I don’t want to live in. Yes, we occasionally see diamonds in the rough, but even those are usually dwarfed by the awfulness of the rest of the market. For example, Monument Valley, a beautiful, critically acclaimed “successful” mobile game has made $6M in revenue. The abominable Game of War will make that much by the end of this week. Which type of game do you think Konami is going to try to make?
Given Konami's recent actions, diving headfirst into the lake of fire that is mobile gaming is no real surprise. But if more and more companies want to stop trying to make money by selling high quality games, and try to trick people into buying cheap, addictive crap instead, that is what could ultimately doom the gaming industry.
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