Hideo Kojima “Leaves” Konami
November 1st, 2015
Hearts were broken on October, 9th when Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind iconic titles such as Metal Gear, left Konami. Metal Gear fans grieved together when Kojima walked out of Konami studios for the last time. A lot of MG fans believe that the series will now die without Kojima around, however, the development team that worked with Kojima to create MG titles has not changed aside from losing Kojima. This means that there is potential for future MG games yet fans still believe that future titles wont ever be able to compare to games developed by Kojima.
It has been speculated that Kojima felt the need to leave Konami studios when they began changing their focus to mobile games instead of console and PC games. Konami’s switch to mobile could be due to the higher return value considering mobile games cost significantly less to produce that other platforms while still creating exceptional revenue. Being strongly connected to his fans, Kojima most likely understood how upset his fans would be if he stayed with Konami’s when he himself did not support their decisions.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will be the last title with the signature “Kojima Productions” and will forever stand as a monument of Kojima’s final MG title. Fans can only hope that Kojima will return one day with a new development team to create a game bigger than Metal Gear.
Tags:
x MGSV x Hideo Kojima x Konami x Metal Gear x Mobile
YouTube Red
October 22nd, 2015
A lot of controversy has sparked regarding the announcement of YouTube Red, a new subscription service YouTube recently introduced. Being the world’s most popular free video streaming website, a majority of YouTube fans are up in arms at the idea of having to pay a subscription fee to watch content from their favourite YouTubers. However, YouTube claims that users will still be able to view 99% of the content they would usually watch for free if they do not pay for Red. The 1% of content they will not be able to see consists of exclusive content created by YouTubers. By subscribing to Red and paying the $9.99/ monthly fee, users are able to access exclusive content and as an added bonus, don’t have to watch advertisements. Most believe that what made YouTube so great was that it allowed viewers to watch any video on the site for free. With Red essentially taking that ability away from viewers by implementing exclusive content, it is understandable that the community is outraged.
So what about content creators? One of the biggest problems content creators have with Red is the fact that if they do not agree and sign its contract, their content will be marked as private and YouTube users will be unable to view said content. This is a huge problem for content creators who rely on making video as a source of income because views play a fairly large role in how much a YouTuber can make. Currently, partnered YouTubers make revenue through the use of ads on their videos. YouTube Red introduces a secondary way of making revenue by agreeing to give a majority of Red subscription revenue to its partners. This system seems to largely benefit channels such as PewDiePie, which has almost 40 million subscribers, considering a larger fan base means more potential Red subscriptions. This means PewDiePie would only benefit from Red’s services. Currently it is unclear as to how this will impact smaller partnered content creators.
Tags:
x YouTube Red x YouTube x Subscription
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