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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

Severing your relationship with a generation-defining artist because they had one whiff that only brought in $140,000,000+ in revenue seems shortsighted, even if you actually did lose money on that entry. About what I would expect from the MBA-driven economy, though. Your golden goose has shit out 10 golden eggs for you, then it lays one regular egg and you try to kill it. Except you fail and somebody else gets your goose instead.

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Kojima is infamous for being difficult to work with as well as expensive, and Death Stranding 2 didn't do that well after the already-divisive Death Stranding. I think describing him as a generation-defining artist is a bit much, something a devoted fan might say. His mistreatment of David Hayter because David isn't an A-list Hollywood actor really soured my view of him. By all accounts, Kojima has a fantasy of being a Hollywood director and hanging out with movie stars, and he wants to make gigantic expensive Hollywood movie-esque projects. I'm not surprised Sony would get cold feet.

Sony also presumably has a lot of visibility into the project, and it was already being framed as "genre-defining." I've loved various Kojima games but especially with the other exclusives line-up that Sony has, I can understand this is just too much risk for them.

It remains to be seen what egg will be laid in this case, how many golden ones may come after, and how many end up on Playstation anyway.

Really odd indeed, many of the Sony executives used to be relatively "It's OK to fail once, you've proven you can output stuff given resources", but seemingly there is a new Sony now where not obsessively cutting costs and doing bets isn't part of the culture anymore. Sad to see.

It's still the same kind of leadership that also closed Japan Studio as well as Studio Liverpool.

They don't understand what made the brand great in aggregate.

The W in MBA stands for Wisdom!

Kojima has a history of overspending by trying to make grandiose but weird games. And while they performed well, MGS4 sold less then The Last of Us or other big hits. I think that Kojima's games are games that people talk about more than they play. Probably MGS5 is the only one that actually "plays good".

Back then gaming wasn't as big as it is today. It does make sense to have TLOU outsold MGS4, they have 5 years gap, it is more than a decade later for both games now. I think we need to talk about percentage impacts rather than absolute numbers.

But how many of those games are console shifters? Hell back in the day I finally caved and bought a PS3 because of MGS4. Alright it may only shift say, 60% of the units, but if more of those units included a console purchase too then the onward value is huge.

Uncharted did more for PS3 than MGS4. I doubt anyone bought a PS4 for Death Stranding.

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