What happened to Metal Gear after Kojima left Konami?
The documented spine is short. In March 2015, during a corporate restructuring, Konami removed the Kojima Productions branding from Metal Gear Solid V promotional materials, and Kojima was no longer listed as an executive content officer. In April 2015, Konami cancelled Silent Hills, the Kojima and Guillermo del Toro project. At The Game Awards on December 3, 2015, host Geoff Keighley told the audience on stage that a lawyer representing Konami had informed Kojima he would not be allowed to travel to the ceremony or accept any award for Metal Gear Solid V, which won that night. On December 15, 2015, Japan's Nikkei reported that Kojima had left Konami and was forming a new company, and that the rights to Metal Gear remain with Konami. Konami had spent that autumn denying departure reports and saying Kojima was taking a long vacation. Both the departure and the denial are part of the record, and this page prints both.
Why it happened has never been stated publicly by either side, and this Library does not settle it. The BBC's reporting puts the common theory at its correct weight: nothing has been said publicly, and one generally accepted theory relates to the spiralling cost of Metal Gear Solid V, estimated by some at more than $80 million. That is a theory with an estimate attached, labeled here as exactly that. What is documented is the direction Konami took next: industry analyst Christopher Dring told the BBC the company shifted its strategy away from console games for a while, toward amusement machines such as pachinko, and increasingly toward mobile, and its other classic series went quiet alongside Metal Gear.
ACT ONE: A NEW GENRE
Metal Gear Survive, 2018
The reception is documented, and it was rough. Reviews were mixed to poor, the game debuted at number six in the UK charts, and UK launch reporting put its first week at about 85 percent below the previous spin-off, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, in physical sales. Konami's own financial report for the period mentioned the release and offered no comment on its performance, in contrast to the stable performance it noted for its football series in the same report. No new Metal Gear game followed it for five years. The experiment answered its own question: the audience would not follow the name into a different genre without the series' creator or its stealth core.
ACT TWO: KEEP THE CATALOGUE ALIVE
Master Collection, 2023Konami's road back ran through preservation first. Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 launched on October 24, 2023, gathering Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the first three Metal Gear Solid games, and, as bonus material, even the NES Metal Gear and Snake's Revenge, the two versions Kojima disowned. The market case was already on Konami's own books: the company announced the series had sold 60 million copies in total as of June 2023, a catalogue that kept selling with no new game behind it.
ACT THREE: THE FAITHFUL REMAKE
Delta, 2025
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater launched on August 28, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 with support from Virtuos, and led by veterans of the original games, producer Noriaki Okamura and creative producer Yuji Korekado. Its method was the opposite of Survive's. Okamura described the theme of the remake, in his own words, as creating a "remake that is too faithful," paying the utmost respect to the original work. The story was not changed. The original voice performances were retained in both Japanese and English, with the original actors brought back only to re-record the lines that teach controls the remake changed, and players could choose the classic fixed camera and controls in a Legacy Style mode alongside the modern scheme.
Konami confirmed during development that Kojima Productions is not involved. Asked whether he would play the remake, Kojima laughed and answered, in an interview quoted widely since: "No, I won't." The post-Kojima chapter, as it stands on the record, is therefore a stewardship story, not a continuation story: a failed genre experiment, a long quiet, a catalogue collection, and then a remake whose stated ambition was to change as little as possible. Whether new chapters follow is Konami's to announce. This page will be updated from the record when they do.