Arcade/Video game company Konami has changed drastically for the past year beginning with the cancellation of Silent Hills, a horror game directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, staring Norman Reedus. Since then, every news from Konami has have been very controversial. I want to talk about one particular news that came out shortly after Silent Hills' cancellation.
Back in September, a report from Nikkei had indicated that Konami was moving away from the AAA console
business and that they wanted to focus more on the pachinko
business in Japan, as well as the constantly budding mobile market. From a business standpoint, it is understandable why they made such decision. AAA video games are very expensive to make and it doesn't always guarantee a profit, just like Hollywood films. On the other hand, mobile games are low-cost which companies would not have to worry about losing money.
Although mobile games are sometimes profitable, the mobile game industry is a huge mess at the moment. One major problem is that these games are plague with micro-transaction. It's the very reason why mobile games are nicknamed Fee-to-Pay. Many mobile games have locked contents behind a pay wall, forcing players to spend more money to buy in-game stuff. Before you know it, the player may have wasted hundreds or thousands of pounds just to play a game. This is a bad anti-consumer business practice.
Mobile gaming also has a serious problem with copycat apps. The mobile app market has become completely inundated with applications that do nothing but copy and paste the efforts of brilliant
developers for a quick buck. It’s gotten so bad that most consumers
don’t even know which one was the original. The saddest part is many of these clones are so successful that the original games and their
original developers have no reason to exist beyond inspiring more clones.
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