Just hear me out and use your brain to pick a choice at the end.
You create a design for a car. Now, originally it was a bit clunky, and it wasn't visually appealing; however, it was popular for what it was, as despite itself, it was a still a good car. It was your first car, and you built off of it. Your second car is a huge success; it had the right mix of functionality and style, and it led to people taking your brand name seriously. You go on to make a decent third car, but when it came time for the fourth one, you couldn't get some of the parts to function, and it wound up being a little messier than usual. Despite the flaws, your first four cars were good to excellent on the whole.
Then comes the time to make a fifth car. Nothing special, but it still felt like part of your line-up, despite the shift in who's developing it. Around the sixth car, you decide to hire out an entirely new team to make this car, and what occurs is a mess. It's not fuel efficient, it's design is mediocre, and despite trying to convince your market that it *is* apart of your company, they just don't agree with it as you might've hoped. You hire out a new development team again, and get your old development team to try to revamp some of your old designs. While your new car isn't as bad as the last one visually, it still had a lot of internal issues, maybe even more than the last...and a major issue is, you release the car at about the same time as the old designs; and the old team couldn't quite upgrade the old designs to a modern day theme.
You're struggling to keep your market base. You're desperate for a new design idea. Then, as if winning the lottery, you suddenly have extremely skilled people who are willing to help you. They work up a mock prototype that's slick, well-designed and appealing. Focus groups agree with it, and the public consensus is that it's a return to formula that was sorely overdue. It is an extremely popular idea, one that could bring you back into the forefront of the car industry; or at the very least, your section of the industry. It could be so good, it could influence the industry itself to follow suit.
Do you:
A: Let the people work on the project in peace, understanding that any expenditures would be made back threefold.
B: Bring in one or two more creative minds, people who've worked on similar cars in the past, to work with your developers to maximize the potential of the project.
or
C: Burn the design to the ground, alienate your key market base here, and cut all ties with the professionals on the project; so much so, you alienate one from another product line he has worked on for decades. In doing so, he will take the best damn engine your company has ever used with him, design and all.
If you picked A or B, congratulations! You made a good choice as a business. If you said C, congratulations. You are as insane as Konami.
The most successful horror demo, period.
I don't understand. I can't fathom what would drive a company to make such a choice in the matter, when you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
"I felt strongly that from now on, mobile will be at the heart of game
platforms, and that we need a business strategy which creates games in
accordance with observations of consumer usage trends. Arcade games,
console games, card games; we need to shift from selling 'physical
things' to selling 'intangible things'," -Konami CEO Hideki Hayakawa (GamesIndustry.biz)
The above quote tells me Konami is heading toward the micro-transactions of popular mobile and tablet games, but many parts of the game industry have adopted seriously poor practices of DLC and micro-transactions. There are positive examples, as Valve's Steam platform will almost always offer good deals to compensate for any small purchases (with some of their games having actual Economies they let run themselves for the most part). Hearthstone from Blizzard does not require you to pay to play, and with enough time, you can compete well enough to rank. But for every relatively benign ploy, there's the horrible overpricing of something as simple as skins (Evolve) to just being able to play the way you want to (the new Dirty Bomb game). You could argue that CS:GO does something similar, and that Dirty Bomb is free to play; but Counter-Strike has at least earned a reputation before charging you for optional weapon skins, and Hearthstone lets me play whatever class I want with whatever cards I choose.
But I digress. It's not whether or not I want Konami to stay around; as far as I'm concerned, the name has long since died, with only a few gasps of solid design in-between the mediocre and the misguided games. My concer, is whether or not they let IP's thrive or die to a refusal to let them go.
Now, here's the kicker. I'm a Silent Hill fan through and through. I love Silent Hill 2 for having subtle mechanics for getting into your head, I love 3 for having great musical backing, and I can appreciate some of the elements even in Homecoming and Downpour for "getting it", even if it's not a constant throughout the game. But you want my opinion on the matter?
Let the series die.
No, I am neither insane nor high right now.
That might shock some to hear, if they knew how avid a fan I was (or read how much I ranted at something like Downpour). "But why?" It's quite simple, really. You don't need Silent Hill to be Silent Hill. Just look at exhibit A: PT. PT did NOT have to be in Silent Hill. It could've been in any town. It could've been a nice house along the road outside a town. It was self-contained to a room; and the atmosphere was insane. The visuals, disturbing. The audio, disorienting. Every step, every subtle change, every little facet of design and presentation was genuine, fresh, unique.
Kojima and Del Toro don't need Silent Hill. Silent Hill needed them. And if that's the case, so be it. They have the creativity and the tools to make their own, brand new horror IP. We don't need James Sunderland or the Mason family, we don't need the town or the fog or the lore. We need a fresh start, a new IP that works with the same concept of disturbing one mentally by playing with psychological thrills. All they need is the backing now, and as of June 12th, it a petition has been backed on change.org to the tune of 166,000 people and growing. Among the people, Del Toro himself has signed it, indicating that he is still interested in taking this project on.
And I hope Kojima and Norman Reedus are as well.
To whomever takes up the project and brings us a fresh new horror IP, I applaud you. I will applaud Kojima, Del Toro and Reedus for sticking it out and bringing it to us. I will applaud everyone who worked on it, with the passion to not let a good idea go to waste due to petty squabbles or poor business practices. Games like these deserve to be made, because they keep the industry from stagnation by cookie-cutter triple-A titles that have to adhere to a formula in order to maintain a profit. They keep people involved and dreaming up their own original games that one day, could be made and popularized.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, it's the only way we can keep the industry listening to us, and what we want.
