Speaking to Kikizo, Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions talked about his recent push towards Western development in his own division within Konami. He talked about how Western developers have changed the way he views development going forward.

"What I'm thinking now is, OK, we need to be a global studio. Kojima Productions has always been essentially Japanese, making our stuff in Japan and releasing it to the world," said Kojima. "We've been doing it this way for more than ten years, and we've had total freedom in terms of what we wanted to do during that time. But now, I feel it's time to look outside of Japan. You know - what can we absorb, what can we copy from these Western developers? What kind of steps should we take as Kojima Productions to change for the better and remain a strong global studio? That's what we're thinking right now."

"We've always observed other studios within Konami, but I decided that we shouldn't just rely on that; we should take it one step further and look at studios outside of Konami, and perhaps identify areas where Kojima Productions lags behind its competitors, and rethink what we should do about it," he continued. "So that was the whole purpose of the tour. But it's not just about the technical processes; it's also about how they're promoting their products, or how they manage within the team. All this we've tried to absorb and learn from."

The interviewer mentioned that Silent Hill, another Konami series, has gone over to a Western developer, and Kojima confirmed that a similar collaboration would be a direction he'd like to go in. "I'm not sure when this will happen, but yes, I'm very interested. There are many development companies outside of Japan working with Konami, and I believe that they're all special in some way; they have their unique points, and if we were to team up with them I wouldn't dictate to them - 'you should do things this way, use this color, change this...' - I'd have to really try to help them do what they do best as production studios. That's how I plan to do it in the future, and to give them freedom."