Finding The Most Interesting Angle of a News Story - Hideo Kojima and Konami

WHY DID HIDEO KOJIMA LEAVE KONAMI?

Published October 19, 2015

On Friday, October 9th, Hideo Kojima left the Tokyo offices of Konami, the video-game company where he had worked since 1986, for the last time. The departure ceremony, according to one of the hundred or so guests who attended, and who asked that I not use his name, took place at Kojima Productions, the director’s in-house studio, and was “a rather cheerful but also emotional goodbye.” He said that he did not see Konami’s president, Hideki Hayakawa, or its C.E.O., Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, at the party, but some of Kojima’s colleagues from other studios showed up to pay their respects, as did many of the people who worked on his most recent directorial project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game, which takes place in mid-nineteen-eighties Afghanistan and Zaire, made a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars on its launch day, in September—more than the two highest-grossing films of the year so far (“Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Jurassic World”) combined. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with such blockbusters, and with the Konami brand itself. His impending resignation had been rumored as early as March, but the fact of it remains startling—as much as if Shigeru Miyamoto, the originator of Donkey Kong and the Mario brothers, left Nintendo.

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Hideo Kojima Leaves Konami as Company Makes The Switch to Mobile Games and Pachinko Machines.

On Friday, October 9th, Hideo Kojima, famously known for his creation of the Metal Gear video game series, left the company he has worked with since 1986. Since 2007, Konami has shifted their main focuses towards mobile games, which gave them an eighty percent profit increase between 2011 and 2012. Konami has also invested in Pachinko machines, which bring in more money than funding AAA video games. Kojima's last and biggest project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Pantom Pain, took too long to create, and cost more than the company wanted, thus causing a fallout between Kojima and Konami. Today, Kojima has created his own video company, Kojima productions, and is currently working on his next big project: Death Stranding. 


The reason I chose to present the information above as a leading paragraph is because it sums up the situation pretty well. Readers can see why Kojima left Konami (mobile game shift) as well as the reasons that led to the departure. It gives viewers every important bit of the article without going to the statistics of mobile game success.