Hideo Kojima: I Am Not Wasting Time and Money on Death Stranding, I Am Developing It Pretty Fast

Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear, is a genius- but like many geniuses, he has a process, and that process often entails spending a lot of time and money in the pursuit of his vision of perfection. With Death Stranding, many get the impression that that is what is happening- especially when, three major showings later, all we have seen of the game are three abstract concept trailers, with no gameplay footage.

Some vocally dissatisfied fans have taken to wondering if Kojima, now working with a publisher giving him free reign, is just going to spend an obscene amount of time and money to satisfy his own sense of perfectionism- but speaking with IGN, Kojima addressed that criticism head on.

“I’ve been reading a lot on the Internet of people saying I’ve spent the last year just traveling around and having fun. A lot of people saying I’m wasting time and money. But that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said. “So, over this past year, we’ve been working on Decima. There are things we don’t know, we ask them, we make some requests. On our end, of course, we use the Decima engine very differently from the way they use it, especially when it comes to the cutscenes. So we make our own things there, and send it to them, show it to them, get their feedback. We are at that pace, currently.

“There’s been a lot of stuff going on through this time, so it makes me pretty sad when people say ‘Oh, you’re just having fun and joking around and wasting money.’ You could ask so many people, but I really think that I’m doing this pretty fast. If you have a company, if you already have an engine, you already have the tools and the team together, and even then, it’s pretty standard for a AAA game to take three to five years to develop their games. For some games, it can take up to 10 years.”

I am sure Kojima is working really hard on this game- it is clear it is a passion project for him, and his work ethic is incredible. I suppose the problem many have is that he hasn’t shown anything tangible for it so far- which, if they are not at that stage yet in development, is understandable. I would rather have the crazy Kojima trailers while we wait for gameplay footage, than nothing at all.