科乐美数字娱乐总裁早川秀树称AI不会显著改变游戏市场，强调人与创作者关键

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Metal Gear and Silent Hill series developer Konami Group recently published its Integrated Report for the fiscal year ending March 2026. The report goes over several different topics, from Konami's corporate values and history to a consolidated financial summary and the business strategies for the various fields of entertainment the company is active in.
As spotted by Dengeki Online, in the Digital Entertainment Business section of the report, Hideki Hayakawa, the president of Konami Digital Entertainment, addressed the rapidly evolving generative AI technology and discussed its potential impact on the industry.

While the general consensus is that generative AI will significantly lower the entry barrier to game development, making it easier for anyone to make their own games, Hayakawa believes that this will not bring a significant change to the market environment. One reason for this is that "entry barriers have already been lowered by the advancements of generic game engines and the spread of UGC (user generated content)," he explains.
"Even if AI use does lead to improvements in production efficiency, I believe that the most important factors in producing entertaining and innovative video games are people and creators," Hayakawa says.

Games are very often developed in teams, where creators of various backgrounds get to exchange their ideas – and Hayakawa explains that the blending of those ideas is precisely what opens up the doors for creating new kinds of gameplay. "That kind of chemical reaction is not something that can be easily replaced."
On the other hand, Hayakawa also says that he views technological advancements, which have long influenced how games are developed, as a significant opportunity for creating new kinds of experiences. "Even when it comes to epoch-making technological innovations, Konami provides systematic support so that creators can get a grasp of new technologies, properly assess the risks they may bring, and safely apply them to game development."

While this doesn't absolve Konami of recent AI usage in localizing Yu-Gi-Oh! TAG FORCE GX into other languages (and broaches a narrower topic of Konami needing better localization in general), it's nice to see the president of a major publisher push back on the "innovations" of AI.

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The Konami 2020s Redemption Arc is still going strong I see

They'd be correct. There is only so much attention and a limited amount of players to consume these games. Execs hem and haw about the speed of development, but an unfathomable amount of games hits the market on a weekly basis because the barrier to tools for game creation have been massively improving over decades. This is prior to GenAI tooling. The supply (and speed) were never the main issues.

Izanagi89

"This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance

I'm here for the Konami redemption arc

This is very nice to hear, particularly from the president of a big software company. Art that isn't made by humans is completely pointless, and we should push back against anyone who claims otherwise.

5 copies of Rhapsody in Scarlet please

Helix

Mayor of Clown Town

yeah I would have expected the complete opposite from them so lol, this is a welcome surprise!

Please Lord...let this be the example others follow.

Hey it's the same guy who wanted Konami to pivot to mobile gaming over 10 years ago. This is one of those times where having dinosaurs as leadership can prevent the newest stupid shit to pollute the product, the same can be said for Nintendo doing their thing and not trying to be the cutting edge of what finance bros think is the future.

Meanwhile Kojima doing AI movies with Winding Refn, Konami on the redemption Arc

There's certainly something to be said about staying the course but...while AI may not bring a lot of change TO YOU, it's already changing everything in this space. We just can't predict the outcome.

You'd think Konami would be especially worried as a lot of their power stems from a strong IP lineup, much of which hasn't been touched in years. Those MGS remakes basically slid under the dropping wall, I'd imagine vibe coded fan ports are going to take a lot of the wind out of the sales of something like a hudson-soft revival.

Hey it's the same guy who wanted Konami to pivot to mobile gaming over 10 years ago. This is one of those times where having dinosaurs as leadership can prevent the newest stupid shit to pollute the product, the same can be said for Nintendo doing their thing and not trying to be the cutting edge of what finance bros think is the future.

The tortoise actually does win the race...

There's certainly something to be said about staying the course but...while AI may not bring a lot of change TO YOU, it's already changing everything in this space. We just can't predict the outcome.
You'd think Konami would be especially worried as a lot of their power stems from a strong IP lineup, much of which hasn't been touched in years. Those MGS remakes basically slid under the dropping wall, I'd imagine vibe coded fan ports are going to take a lot of the wind out of the sales of something like a hudson-soft revival.

Even as problematic as the fast-decomp that's currently ongoing in the mod space, I highly doubt that it means much at all for the prospects of an official Konami product.

You'd think Konami would be especially worried as a lot of their power stems from a strong IP lineup, much of which hasn't been touched in years. Those MGS remakes basically slid under the dropping wall, I'd imagine vibe coded fan ports are going to take a lot of the wind out of the sales of something like a hudson-soft revival.

What are you talking about, Metal Gear Solid Delta sold over two million copies? That's pretty healthy, if Silent Hill f is already considered a success and sold the same. Also, they are reviving their old IP, they're starting with Metal Gear, Castlevania, Silent Hill, and Suikoden. Then once those IP are healthy enough to not need the big push, they'll probably revive other series.

konami being one of the less shitty publishers in 2026 is not something i would have predicted a decade ago

What are you talking about, Metal Gear Solid Delta sold over two million copies? That's pretty healthy, if Silent Hill f is already considered a success. Also, they are reviving their old IP, they're starting with Metal Gear, Castlevania, Silent Hill, and Suikoden. Then once those IP are healthy enough to not need the big push, they'll probably revive other series.

Yes, and did so literally months before AI made it so people can do what they did (and sometimes more) in their homes.

Like, they picked the perfect time do the metal gear remakes and a pretty good time to do the Castlevania remakes.

I'm saying going forward, that will be an incredibly hard sell as AI brings the value of remakes down to either very cheap or free.

With the way things are going, no one will have to wait for Konami to do the remake, AI will do it for you, for free.

I mean, it's an issue of quality.

Flooding the market with shit games will just exacerbate the issue of discovery and filtering crap. But it won't fundamentally lead bad games to success.

And while a few assets or voice files are forgiven by the audience, a bad game isn't.

And when players discover you didn't do any meaningful work to a beloved IP.. well we saw what happened to Shogun 2 this week. You can't just skip the "making games is hard" part of gamedev.