Officially, Konami has said it has undergone a major reorganization and that it remains committed to console and PC game development. Silent Hills, the next edition of the horror franchise to be developed by Kojima Productions, was abruptly canceled in April, and P.T., the game's "playable teaser" was removed from the PlayStation Store, with no means of redownloading for those who had already acquired it. The company has been scrubbing Kojima and Kojima Productions' names from all official company presences, including the box art for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Konami and Hideo Kojima, who has worked at the company for nearly 30 years, are widely believed to be splitting publicly once Metal Gear Solid 5 launches Sept. Seeing that it was making plenty of money without high development costs, Konami's bosses started moving the company away from traditional console and PC-based games. Konami began reorienting itself toward mobile games development in 2010, Nikkei said, after the mobile game Dragon Collection became a huge hit. Of Metal Gear Solid 5, Nikkei says Kojima Productions is now internally named "Number 8 Production Department," and that the game's development has gone past $80 million. Some of what Nikkei reports has been heard before, Kotaku points out, but most of it highlights a workplace where employee movement is monitored by camera and developers are reassigned to menial jobs if they're considered no longer useful. A scathing profile by Nikkei portrays Konami as a workplace riven by suspicion and terrible morale, and where the sizable development cost of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is the final straw in the company's shift to cheaper and more profitable mobile games.
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