Kojima Discusses His New Studio’s Structure

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Hideo Kojima has recently discussed his future plans since his well-documented departure from his previous employer Konami. Speaking to Eurogamer, he explained his newfound hopes and fears in the face of creating his own new studio, Kojima Productions.

After a twenty-five year long career at Konami, Kojima has since left to begin a new venture under his own name, with total support from Sony’s gaming divisions. Along with this, Kojima revealed that he wants to leave the rigid corporate structures of Japan behind him, and engage in new types of business practices.

Although Kojima Productions will make large use of the publishing, marketing and development expertise of Sony, Kojima himself refers to his studio as ‘indie’. He said that Sony has ‘left everything’ to him, allowing him to work free from boardroom influence. “I have the perfect arrangement with them,” he said.

Kojima said that he has taken a great amount of inspiration for his new studio from Media Molecule, the Guildford-based creator of the LittleBigPlanet series. This ‘intimate’ type of studio is the exact type of inspiration that Kojima wants to benefit from.

He revealed that he wants to distance himself from the military-like approach of Japanese business, which describes as having orders filtering down directly from the top, respect not being given to creators and money taking precedence over art.

While Kojima’s work ethic approach seems to suggest a large potential for success, he remains cautious about the eventual scope of Kojima Productions. He admitted, and ensured, that his firm would never reach the size of a group like Konami, blaming large company sizes on interrupting the creative process.

“When things get that large, it becomes a huge undertaking just to organise meetings. I want to stay small enough that we don’t even need meetings; I can just talk to the staff directly. I think a hundred people is about the limit for that way of working,” he said.

Kojima has previously said that his new firm’s original IPs could become a large, serialised game with large merchandising opportunities.