The Konami Incident

Recently Konami has been the recipient of a lot of negative criticism. The
story began to surface in mid-March 2015 with Konami removing Hideo
Kojimas name from various spots on the official Konami-MGS site. On
Konami's website, logos for Kojima Productions, and tags for "a Hideo Kojima
game" have been extensively removed from any & all promotional materials
for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy
Collection and Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes. However according to a
Konami spokesperson Konami Digital Entertainment, including Mr. Kojima,
will continue to develop and support Metal Gear products. Please look
forward to future announcements.
On his official Twitter account, Kojima has continued to tweet about Metal Gear
Solid. On March 16 (the day organizational restructuring went into effect)
the tweeted "a break" with a picture of the game, as well as "heading off."

However that was just the beginning. On April 27 th 2015 Konami removed the
entirety of its stocks from the New York Stock Exchange. When asked Konami

officials said the deletion of the company from the New York Stock Exchange
was a cost savings measure as 99.71 % of the companys stock trading over
the past year occurred in Japan and London. While this alone is not disturbing on
its own, a few hours prior the company announced

The death of Silent Hill

On the 27th of April, just hours before the company announced the removal of
its New York Stock Exchange stocks Konami confirmed the cancellation of the
new Silent Hill game which was teased by a very well received playable
teaser released on late August 2014.
The game was developed by Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima with
Norman Reedus lending his looks for the protagonist. Guillermo Del Toro is
said to have told attendees at a film festival in San Francisco that Silent
Hills "is not going to happen," according to an attendees Twitter. Del Toro's
assistant retweeted that, and then made other comments indicating the
project was being shelved.
Norman Reedus also expressed his frustration regarding the cancellation of
the game.
Both of Del Toros and Reedus comments came after the apparent news hit
that surfaced on April 29th according to which , the playable demo/teaser was
to be pulled off from the PlayStation Network.
Silent Hill along with Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain were 2 of the 3
Konamis major titles currently in development. Pro Evolution Soccer
(Winning Eleven) typically launches in fall, but its latest edition hasnt yet
been announced.

Trailer: P.T.

Why Konami did it

In a recent interview the company's new CEO Hideki Hayakawa states that
mobile gaming is now Konami's future. Speaking in an interview with Nikkei
Trendy Net and translated by a user at NeoGAF, Hayakawa had the following
to say:

Gaming has spread to a number of platforms, but at the end of

the day, the platform that is always closest to us, is mobile.
Mobile is where the future of gaming lies. We hope that our
overseas games such as Metal Gear Solid V and Winning Eleven
continue to do well, but we are always thinking about how to push
our franchises onto mobile there too. With multiplatform games,
there's really no point in dividing the market into categories
anymore. Mobiles will take on the new role of linking the general
public to the gaming world.

While all that sounds great there is also a darker side to the source of this
shift of focus

The Pachinko Business

While Konami is indeed a very good videogames publisher, the majority of

their focus is lately on pachinko slots or as they are more commonly known
pachislots.
So what is a pachinko? According to the internet a pachinko is is a type
of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of
recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device,
filling a Japanese gambling niche comparable to that of the slot machine in
Western gaming. And while it sounds innocent enough on paper, gambling
and casinos are illegal in Japan.
Since 2014 Konami amongst others has been pushing for the Nevada law
which in essence classifies skill-based gambling machines (like pachislots)
legal. The Nevada law passed this week which will ease Konamis shift of
focus. The change comes with the passage of Senate Bill 9, which the
Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers lobbied for. AGEM's
president happens to be Thomas Jingoli, the president of Konami's gambling
division. Konami itself is a "gold member" of the organization.

A videogame in a pachislot

And it keeps getting

darker
Youtuber Super Bunnyhop (creator of the MGS critical close-up videos) has
investigated the whole situation. He claims that he's eventually spoken to an
inside source that he trusts who revealed a lot of info regarding the situation,
including things like Konami's CEO hating Kojima, and Konami making
working conditions unbearable for employees in efforts to force them to quit
rather than have to fire them.
Watch what he has to say about this & what the inside source informed him
about regarding the Konamis moves.

The conclusion
As it seems at the moment, with Konamis allocated focus towards mobile
gaming and gambling we will see less and less of the games we loved and
grew up with like Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. What will happen next
regarding the release and development of such future titles, while it looks
grim, is not yet clear.