brianhoover156:

kzinssie:

so with metal gear survive announced and people wondering why the hell konami’s destroying themselves, i thought id give some insight into this matter.

i have friends in japan – both natives, and expats now living there. and according to them – and i say this because i have absolutely no sources on this, and based on the nature of this none probably exist – konami is basically the yakuza’s gaming branch. most of the higher-ups have some ties to the yakuza, and have basically since the company’s inception.

so, what does this have to do with konami tearing themselves apart? easy – yakuza no longer wants konami around. maybe someone at konami specifically did something to piss them off and now they’re cutting off ties, maybe theyve found another company that’s better for their purposes, maybe they just don’t want to be involved in gaming anymore.

what matters is – they want konami out of the picture. but they can’t just close them down, or people would get suspicious. so what theyre doing is, theyre frantically laundering money out of the company while deliberately misusing its assets to turn the least profit possible for plausible deniability. fire kojima to erode consumer trust. cancel a high-profile, high-budget game. spend a bunch of money on fox engine remasters of snake eater cutscenes for a pachinko machine that wont make a tenth of that money back. for that matter, use your licenses on pachinko machines – its a dying market and doing so will both erode consumer trust and potentially wring a bit more money out of pachinko from diehard fans before the industry collapses entirely. do pointless microtransactions in mgo because (i would imagine, i dont exactly have a lot of experience in this field) microtransaction profit is an easy number to forge if you need the numbers to line up. and now – make a zombie survival game under the metal gear license, which is doomed to fail due to market saturation and fan backlash, but give it a aaa budget so you can sneak in a couple thousand extra dollars that no one will suspect youve just laundered out. these are all things that they can easily claim are just bad business decisions, despite actually forming a clear pattern. this is intentional. they dont want your money, because that means more they have to launder out before they can close the company entirely.

like i say, i have no hard evidence or sources on this, but it explains a hell of a lot – my guess is, they started this process around when mgs5 came out and silent hills was canceled. the best we can hope for is that, when they finally close down the company, they hold a thq-style auction for all their ips.

theres a lot of evidence to this too, I will cite sources. Pachinko often (at least up until the mid 90′s) used Yakuza safe houses or gathering spots as prize exchanges, so you could trade in the cheap crap from the pachinko parlor for money, often this was a formal thing too, like contract, money everything legit. Companies like Konami, Sega and Namco got their foot in the door gaming wise with gambling games like pachinko (no links here, as it can easily be found on their wiki’s)

because of this, and the often brutal ways that japan runs their business, with pressure being put on people who need to perform, and companies, and some of the people left to sink with it being a common tactic for organized crime….it all makes sense. 

http://www.japansociety.org/pachinko_nation

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21620248-legal-gambling-and-changing-tastes-threaten-huge-pachinko-business-balls-air

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-08-07-konamis-draconian-workplace-raises-no-eyebrows-in-japan

http://gematsu.com/2015/08/nikkei-report-bad-things-happening-konami