OneCatch said:
I don't even rate Kojima, but what the fuck is wrong with these people? Did Kojima sleep with all the Board's wives or something?
Normally with this kind of corporate bollocks you can at least see the motivation: EA want to challenge Steam and avoid piracy; hence Origin. Ubi want to compete with annual COD releases, hence Assassins Creed being unfinished.
But with this, I don't even see what they're trying to do. What do Konami gain by firing, and then doing their level best to persecute, one of their primary artistic assets? Even if they want to move toward arcade games, why do they need to try to destroy Kojima to do so?
It could just be timing though. I mean, if the Activision/Infinity Ward feud had just started right around the release of its last CoD game and lawsuits were being filed, would Activision have let the old Infinity Ward employees up on stage to accept an award for a game series that they (Infinity Ward) didn't own the rights to and were in contention with the company that did?
Even without contention, lifetime achievement awards are given to people rather than game series for a similar reason, because there's no way in hell Microsoft is going to let old Bungie employees accept an award for Halo, they would send Microsoft or 343 studio employees, because Microsoft owns Halo, not bungie, just like Konami owns MGS, not Kojima.
Kojima is one of those rare developers where his name and style is known above the studio he works for, but in the end, MGS still doesn't belong to him, and he was basically just fired, that it happened so fast and so soon after the games release is why I think we are running into this situation.
It's understandable in that Konami doesn't want fired employees, especially ones that the other company execs might have some bad blood with, coming up to accept awards for games it owns the rights to, in most cases the audience wouldn't be able to tell the difference because we tend to recognize the studio rather than individual employees at the studio. Kojima's status as a sort of celebrity, and the constant news stories about his breakup with Konami make this a notable story as instead of associating the development studio with the game, we associate it as an artistic work created by Kojima himself, which makes it seem like a personal attack.
Still comes off as a dick move, but I can see what the logic Konami is likely using here, you don't let a terminated employee accept an award for something you own, not only does it create problems, it creates a weird legal risk if kojima ever tries to sue for the rights of MGS. I have no idea how the Japanese legal system works, but an American judge would look at an ex-employee who directed the creation of a game being allowed to accept an award for said game after their termination as a confounding factor if that creator ever tried to sue the company for the intellectual rights to said game.
