Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions is going viral once again, this time for one of his older predictions about where the future of digital gaming is bound to go. A foremost auteur of the gaming industry, Kojima has been in charge of his own gaming studio, Kojima Productions, since 2015, though it also existed as a Konami subsidiary since 2005.
While Metal Gear Solid is the man’s most ubiquitous offering, Kojima has done way more than that. Death Stranding has been his studio’s most prominent recent release, with the mysterious horror-focused OD the next big thing. While Kojima’s games have always been well regarded, strange as they sometimes were, one of the things fans like about them the most is how prophetic some of their aspects can be. In Metal Gear Solid 2, for example, Kojima predicted the spreading of fake news and social media bubbles, and his track record is now set to continue in the context of digital gaming.
Hideo Kojima Has a Contingency Plan for When He Dies
Hideo Kojima reveals that he’s been thinking about death, and has come up with a plan to preserve his ideas in the event that he passes away.
As Kojima put it half a decade ago, “We will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved. I would be a have-not.” Though his comments were more in the context of excessive and egregious media control and censorship, they ring true now that Sony announced it’s ditching physical media. This change in direction will come to fruition by 2028, though it’s already obvious that it signals the end of one of the last bastions of physical games. Whereas Kojima’s comments once might’ve sounded alarmist or overly dramatic, they feel perfectly sensible in the contemporary context, as information control becomes an increasingly prominent aspect of daily life.
While Kojima’s comments may have seemed somewhat out of place in 2021, it was already clear in which direction the industry was headed at the time. Digital-only had been the only way to go on PC for a very long time at that point, and there had been rumors of Xbox going all-digital as early as Xbox One. Even more worrying than the transition to all-digital is the first part of Kojima’s 2021 commentary, however, when he said that “eventually, even digital data will no longer be owned by individuals on their own initiative. Whenever there is a major change or accident in the world […] access to it may suddenly be cut off.”
What’s That Weapon?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)
Kojima’s comments should first and foremost be taken in the context of widespread media control, but it’s worth keeping in mind that all-digital may well be just another step towards a worse end-goal. It’s possible that the next big leap forward for mainstream gaming will be yet another attempt to make cloud gaming a thing, and the current prices of gaming hardware make that a much more likely option than it was during the Stadia era.
Gamers have been wondering if cloud gaming is the future for a very long time now, too, but the state of the industry simply wasn’t there until recently. It becomes much easier to swallow horrid latency problems, compression artifacts, and the inability to customize and mod games when gaming hardware costs twice as much as it did before, however, and so people might be more willing to choose the cheaper option in the short term than ever before. Kojima’s comments may feel even more prophetic should this come to be and users’ entire compute capability gets commodified and offshored into easily controllable data center operations.
