Konami has announced that it is making smartphones its new “main platform”. This doesn’t appear to mean that the video game company will be abandoning consoles, but it would appear that Konami now believes that mobile games are the future and intends to cater to that market instead.
The news comes from a translated interview with new Konami President Hideki Hayakawa, who said that Konami will “pursue mobile games aggressively,” and that “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.”
Konami has not had a good few months after troubling news about a rift with Metal Gear creator Hijeo Kojima began circulating. That incident has not entirely been resolved, although both Konami and Kojima have been silent on the matter. Konami has also recently delisted itself from the New York Stock Exchange and cancelled the development of a new Silent Hills game.
The image is one of a company struggling to find relevance and is jumping on what it perceives to be the next big thing in gaming. However, it isn’t the only video game maker that has decided to get into mobile games. Fellow Japanese studio Nintendo will also be releasing its first range of mobile games for Android and iOS later this year, while Final Fantasy creator Square-Enix has been experimenting with mobile for a while now.
Konami will apparently be pushing its current existing franchises over to mobile, although what that means is unclear. It could be pushing properties like Metal Gear to mobile; which is, admittedly, not an entirely bad idea.
[Source: NeoGAF via Ars Technica]
