During the week of PSX, Kojima was supposed to have been in California attending The Game Awards. Unfortunately, Konami prevented Kojima from attending the awards with the rest of his peers and so Kojima remained in Japan watching the stream live. While this led to a massive backlash from fans across the world as they rallied around Kojima on Twitter, may this have had a further implication for Kojima and Sony?
A few days after the Game Awards, PSX also took place in California. Had Kojima have attended the TGAs, it would certainly be a possibility that Kojima would drop by the huge PlayStation Expo if just to meet and greet some Metal Gear fans. Now we’re just speculating here, but what if Konami threw a real curve ball into the mix? By preventing Kojima from attending the TGA awards, did Konami also ruin a blockbuster announcement on Sony’s part? It may have been pure coincidence but perhaps this was Konami twisting the knife in the back of Kojima once more before his final departure, and perhaps that’s why Sony’s keynote at PSX ended rather abruptly.
The keynote wasn’t necessarily lacking some big hitting reveals that had PlayStation fans cheering at their monitors. The likes of Final Fantasy VII, the Uncharted 4 announcement and Ni No Kuni 2 were definitely the killer announcements of the conference, but from the way that some industry insiders were talking about the announcements to be made at PSX a few weeks before, we expected something a little more. Had Kojima walked out with Andrew House at the end, Kojima Productions’ new logo slapped on the big screen, it certainly would have raised people’s opinions of the keynote speech.
Unfortunately, the keynote ended on an announcement that while exciting, didn’t feel like it had the oomph behind it that the big announcements we mentioned earlier did. This could perhaps suggest that Konami’s aforementioned curveball, preventing Kojima from attending the TGAs meant that Sony was left without its announcement to round out the keynote. Of course, we must acknowledge the fact that Kojima could always have hopped on a plane for just PSX, but it does seem coincidental.
Revealing Epic Games, a developer strongly linked with Xbox, and Kojima Productions, a studio with a stellar reputation one after the other would have been more of a killer blow to Microsoft and really had fans losing their minds. Introducing these final two announcements as “Two new developers joining the PlayStation family,” rather than Epic Games just walking out would certainly have rounded the conference out in a much cleaner way. What we were instead left with was an abrupt ending to a keynote of rare high’s and more frequent meh’s.
