Report: Kojima Productions Veteran Kenichiro Imaizumi Departs Following Death Stranding Release - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 May 2020 / 3,838 Views
Kojima Productions veteran Kenichiro Imaizumi has reportedly left the company, according to Video Games Chronicle. Imaizumi left the company following the release of Death Stranding.
Imaizumi at Konami worked on every Metal Gear game since the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. He was a producer on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, and Death Stranding.
A source speaking with Video Games Chronicle said he left the company "due to a disagreement with Kojima Productions’ other directors."
Death Stranding is available now for the PlayStation 4.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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"due to a disagreement with Kojima Productions’ other directors." - so he basically disagreed with Kojima.
As unpopular as this stance will no doubt be, I can kind of see why Konami wanted to shorten Kojima's leash. He was probably too much of a pain in the ass for their upper management and not bringing in enough profit to justify the aggravation.
Yupp. Look I do not like Konami (the new one) not a bit, but there is obviously an ego problem with Kojima. That was pretty pretty much evident in the last one and a half decade. I like his work, but damn, I would hate to work for him.
Well that is a loss, expect he finds a good developer to work at.
Wish him the best for the future :) According to rumors, more old Konami-employees are joining the new Kojima Productions team, thanks to Death Stranding's success. Hope its true! The Quality of Death Stranding was great, but a bigger team is better for more new games-projects :)
Yea I don't think it is because of Death Stranding or at least not entirely. Have you seen konami's line up over the last 3 years they can barely break 1 million units sold after combining multi platform sales all while nintendo is out selling them with exclusive cardboard. Basically Yu gi oh, mobile games and Pro Evolution Soccer(or how I like to call it the poor man's fifa) is all they have left, so no wonder they want to leave. Many of them probably grew up wanting to work for companies like konami because of the early era of games from castlevania to early metal gear and end up developing cash grab mobile apps.
Konami isn't just a video game company. They have a lot of business lines in Japan. Kojima wasn't giving them a good ROI. MGS games were expensive to produce but the series was never a huge blockbuster on the scale of Final Fantasy or Nintendo's big franchises.
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