Konami (2015-present)

Konami Holdings Corporation (コナミホールディングス株式会社, Konami Hōrudingusu Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese entertainment conglomerate and video game company. Konami is a producer and distributor of video games, trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. The company has casinos around the world and operates health and physical fitness clubs across Japan.

Why They Became Komoney

 * 1) They cancelled many highly anticipated titles.
 * 2) * After Silent Hills was cancelled, tensions between Konami and Hideo Kojima rose. While what specifically happened between them hasn't been said publicly, but it lead to them parting ways.
 * 3) While they haven't completely abandoned console and PC gaming, they've shifted their focus towards mobile games and pachinko machines, both of which are inferior to the former for no reason other than that they're cheaper to produce and make lots of money. P.T., a teaser game for Silent Hills, was delisted from the PlayStation store in April 2015, eight months after its release.
 * 4) * In an effort to make gambling legal in Japan, they turned their most beloved franchises into pachinko machines after the titles failed to meet their critical and commercial expectations. For example, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was met with mixed reviews and middling sales, and since then, with the exception of pachinko machines, a Netflix original animated series, the series being represented in mh:awesomegames:Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and 35th Anniversary "celebration" NFTs (NFTs that use Ethereum are known to cause harm to the environment as well as frequent scams that led to decline of NFTs popularity and sales), Konami has barely done anything with Castlevania.
 * 5) * Also, ever since Silent Hills was cancelled, the Silent Hill franchise went dormant for a while until they revealed a Silent Hill-themed pachinko machine. They later announced two new Silent Hill games, with one being an episodic style game while the other is a reboot of the franchise.
 * 6) * Something similar happened with Ganbare Goemon (known as Mystical Ninja outside of Japan), which, aside from two pachinko machines, hasn't had a proper entry since Ganbare Goemon: Tōkai Dōchū Ōedo Tengu ri Kaeshi no Maki, which was released for the Nintendo DS back in 2005.
 * 7) * Even when they do make console games, they have been low-effort, hollow, mostly overpriced ones trying to sell on name recognition alone, not passionately crafted products, the most recent examples, of course, being Metal Gear Survive and Contra: Rogue Corps.
 * 8) They treat their employees in abysmal ways. For example, when Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia ' s sales were poor, Konami demoted Koji Igarashi to a desk job.
 * 9) They weren't willing to give Hideo Kojima credit for his work to the point where they removed his name and the Kojima Productions logo from the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain box art, banned him from winning at the Game Awards 2015 ceremony, and came to pretend like he never worked with them in the first place. In other words, they treated Hideo Kojima, one of the most important people in video game history, like chopped liver. This is very disrespectful and narcissism and at its finest.
 * 10) *Even Geoff Keighley, the host of the awards, felt sympathy for Kojima being kicked out, and tried to make it up for Kojima by awarding him the Industry Icon Award the following year.
 * 11) Many of their mobile games, especially the Android ports, don't have any hacking protection. Unlike other online mobile games, which won't let you connect to their servers using hacked APKs, "hacked" APKs of Konami games can be played online without any negative repercussions. In other words, Konami's purpose on the mobile game market can be easily defeated with this antic, as players will surpass several P2W sessions without paying a single cent.
 * 12) They dissolved Hudson Soft in 2012 and have done absolutely nothing with their franchises ever since (except for Bomberman).
 * 13) * Speaking of Bomberman, Konami was the reason Bomberman: Act Zero was made, not Hudson.
 * 14) They are often prone to copyright claiming videos about their games, even if it's just an unboxing video. The most infamous case of copyright infringement abuse from them is the time when they gave a copyright strike to Super Bunnyhop.
 * 15) They don't seem to listen to criticism, regardless of how constructive it is. In fact, they deliberately ignore them
 * 16) They only care about money now, and it is the reason they've turned their most beloved franchises into pachinko machines and a lot of their games now suffer from microtransactions like Metal Gear Survive.
 * 17) * In Metal Gear Survive, you either grind a lot or pay $10 in order to create a new save file.
 * 18) Similar to Capcom, they shut down some of their subsidiaries, such as Team Silent to make room for Western developers.
 * 19) They ruined their own franchises like Silent Hill (with the cancellation of Silent Hills), Castlevania (with Lords of Shadow 2), Metal Gear (with Survive), and Contra (with Rogue Corps).
 * 20) They ignored their other franchises such as, Gradius, Ganbare Goemon, Lethal Enforcers, Sparkster, Twin Bee, AirForce Delta, and Parodius and many others. Most of the IPs mentioned here are dead (outside of pachinko machines).
 * 21) * Speaking of Parodius it didn't get an actual new game outside of updated rereleases since 1997.
 * 22) * Also, Sparkster had a mediocre revival in form of Rocket Knight in 2010.
 * 23) They royally screwed up the beloved SAW franchise with the releases of Saw and SAW II: Flesh & Blood.
 * 24) They don't even know how to publish good games based on television shows, as disastrous games such as Ben 10 Alien Force: The Rise of Hex prove.
 * 25) They did a terrible job at promoting Blades of Time, as they only decided to announce the game a whopping three days after it came out! This unsurprisingly caused the game to sell extremely poorly.
 * 26) They have taken stances against fan games based on their properties, just like Nintendo did. For example:
 * 27) * They forced the developers of Shadow Moses, an Unreal Engine 4 remake of mh:awesomegames:Metal Gear Solid, to cancel their game.
 * 28) * They did the same thing with a remake of the first Castlevania game.
 * 29) In an attempt to promote the newly released Link monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, Konami released the infamous Master Rules 4 that essentially force the existing players to use the Link monsters by preventing them from summoning any extra deck monster unless using the limited extra monster zone or using a Link monster to increase the number of the possible extra zone. Two years after protests and players leaving en-masses, Konami removed the restrictions in 2020.
 * 30) * Prior to this, Konami has also used the banlist to force players to use the new types of monsters they have introduced. With them usually banned any monster from the previous type to promote the new ones.
 * 31) Hygiene standards at their official Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments were so poor and bad that they actually had to institute a mandatory hygiene clause in their rule books and penalize smelly players and players wearing dirty clothes.
 * 32) Speaking of which, the Konami Arcade Championship is a complete mess for a number of reasons:
 * 33) *The qualification standards are absolutely abysmal and they didn't provide travel accomodations to players from North America or Europe.
 * 34) *Players were given NO PERIOD to warm up, to the point where some Dance Dance Revolution players had to practice on a set of stair handrails from memory we are not joking.
 * 35) *The tournament structure functions more like qualifying rounds rather than an actual tournament.
 * 36) *EX scoring is a bad scoring method that encourages players to miss more than they should.
 * 37) They gave the Wii U little to no support whatsoever, as all they did was just re-releasing TurboGrafx-16 titles on the Virtual Console, including some of the ones that Hudson Soft made, as they didn't even port any of their original games from the 8th Gen on that system, or didn't even make a game for the console in general, and also did not even release of some of their older games on the Virtual Console, and even made the excuse to say that the install base for the Wii U is too small for the PES series, yet some of the games in that series are released on the Xbox One, which has a smaller install base than the Wii U ever did (save for Latin America), which shows that Konami gave little to no respect for the console whatsoever, which is shameful since they are known to have a good relationship with Nintendo and many of their most iconic games from the 80s & 90s were released on both the NES and SNES, and some of them didn't get re-released on the Virtual Console at all, which is a shame. This is even more heart breaking when you realize that they're support towards many of Nintendo's previous consoles was massive, so seeing that they wouldn't give support towards their next console is very devastating.
 * 38) *In fact, about 60 games from their original library got re-released on the Wii U, not counting Hudson IPs or games from Naxat Soft on TurboGrafx-16, which are owned by Konami since when Kaga Electronics liquidated Naxat's game library to multiple companies since December 2015.
 * 39) *Thankfully, they began coming back to support Nintendo consoles again, by releasing titles on the Nintendo Switch and even revive the Bomberman franchise with Super Bomberman R as a launch title for the console when it first came out. In fact, their support for the Switch is a bit of a step up from what they did on the Wii U, since unlike what they did on that console, they at least make original games for the Switch and even re-released some of their older titles on the Nintendo eShop too, and also port some games on the Switch too, however the amount of games they released for the Switch is rather limited when to what they released on their consoles before the Wii U, and some of their original games from the console have recently been ported to other consoles such as Super Bomberman R, which was ported to both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and they even cancelled an installment of the Track & Field franchise called Hyper Sports R.
 * 40) While arguably the least bad division, BEMANI has made several mistakes in recent years:
 * 41) *For one, they did a horrible job in localizing Pop'n Music for western audiences.
 * 42) ** They made Beat'n Groovy which was a really bad rip-off of the beloved game and failed.
 * 43) ** Then they made a complete reboot of Pop'n Music for the Nintendo Wii that completely changes the gameplay of the original series and also failed.
 * 44) ** Because of that, they never bothered to make another Pop'n Music game for North America again after the failure of those two games.
 * 45) *No localization for Sound Voltex cabinets even when imported meaning that cabinets found in the west still had Japanese text. This can confuse western players who may not understand Japanese.
 * 46) *While still great, Dance Dance Revolution has its share of flaws:
 * 47) **Post-2005 releases (both arcade and home console) are known for having some charts that are off-sync.
 * 48) **Some charts aren't assigned an appropriate difficulty level, meaning they could actually be easier or harder than the level given. Endymion, the hardest chart, is one of the worst offenders of this issue as it has a level 19 challenge difficulty when it should be a level 20.
 * 49) ***This issue used to be much worse as the original scale was 1-10 while the Post-Supernova 2 scale was increased to 1-20. Several charts that originally received a level 10 are now translated to difficulty levels 15-19. So at least now it's easier to determine how hard a chart will likely be.
 * 50) **It has made changes to be more like Stepmania and In the Groove (ITG), all of which are hit or miss, with NGO and Pluto the First being the biggest offenders of this.
 * 51) **Criteria for charts have become very strict yet expressionless, with mixed results.
 * 52) **Extra Stages and some options that were once free now require additional credits or an e-amusement pass to access.
 * 53) *Speaking of which, the e-amusement pass has not been implemented in BEMANI arcade cabinets in Europe, not because Konami doesn't want to implement it, but likely in response to the infamous Article 13 (now known as Article 17). Regardless, there still should be a fix for it.
 * 54) *Payments for several games were increased, and certain features in some of these games were locked.
 * 55) They stopped caring about Frogger, their first successful game in 1981, after the reboots didn't sell well.
 * 56) * They didn’t even bother to put the game on any of their arcade compilations either, with the exception of Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced on GBA. While the game was re-released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch through Arcade Archives, the music was altered due to multiple licensed anime music used back in the original version, which turns to be one of the major reasons why Frogger had not too many re-releases in Japan.
 * 57) After the end of content updates for eFootball PES 2021 Season Update, Konami revealed eFootball 2022, which is basically a free-to-play instalment in the PES series. However, to make a profit off of it, they will be selling offline modes such as Career Mode as DLC and will have a Match Pass system (which is literally a copy off of Fortnite's battle pass!). This revelation angered fans as Konami is now starting to turn PES into a pay-to-win mess, just like that one other game mode that is also pay-to-win....
 * 58) * eFootball 2022's release on Steam was a disaster, as it became the service's worst-reviewed game at the time, and is considered to be one of the worst games of 2021 alongside Balan Wonderworld and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. A clear case that Konami deliberately tarnished the PES franchise and namesake just to mock their own fans.
 * 59) Kagemasa Kozuki, the founder and chairman of the company, doesn't do anything about the horrible business practices happening at his own company nor isn't stopping the executives from doing them, as it might be possible that he's supporting them though this just could only be a coincidence at best.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Konami used to be good and has a rich history of many top-quality games that can still be enjoyed.
 * 2) Despite what they did with Kojima, he thanked them because they're the reason for who he is today.
 * 3) To celebrate their 50th anniversary, they released three collections: Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection, Castlevania Anniversary Collection and Contra Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows. The latter two even include a bonus book explaining some facts about the games.
 * 4) They also celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Castlevania franchise with Castlevania Advance Collection.
 * 5) They still make great music arcade games under the Bemani brand. In fact, it can be argued that Bemani is keeping the little respect left for Konami alive today.
 * 6) In the "Miniature console" craze started from 2015 and onward, Konami released the TurboGrafx-16 Mini in 2020, which featured about 50 titles from TurboGrafx-16, SuperGrafx, TurboGrafx-CD / Duo and even Arcade CD-ROM² games.

Videos
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