Bare with me, I am a business admin major, but I do know a comment with no real business or corporate operations insight to it.

The budget was $80 million including the cost of developing an engine, making both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, and localization.

So of course they went over. How much over is up to speculation, but there are no signs or indications from people within the industry it was that much over (otherwise it would show up as a gigantic expense in Konami's quarterly fiscal reports).

Now before anyone gets on the engine, this is something that Konami is still using. The Fox Engine is still used for the future Metal Gear game, PES, and likely many future titles. Engines take tens of millions of dollars to make and a lot of time. While that expense may be great, if the engine functions well (the Fox Engine does), it can be used for a long time, and even given to other companies to use (for a price), thus being worth the investment.

Nintendo has routinely built about an engine a generation per home console to use for most of their 1st and 2nd party titles (and many 3rd party titles). Star Fox 64, Mario 64, and both Zelda titles on the N64 all use the same engine. By using their own engine, Nintendo was able to custom it as time went on, all without relying on outside sources (and possibly tipping off details about a game).

That was the goal with the Fox Engine. It was a successfully built engine, hence why it is still in use, and why MGS V GZ and TPP run well and look incredible on the 5 systems it appears on.

Now as for you saying Kojima (not Kojima Productions) was a huge waste...

...what world are you living in? Because it certainly isn't reality.

In about 4 months, TPP shipped 6 million copies, not counting digital sales (aka all PC sales). Even at $20, that's $120 million, before merchandising profits (which Metal Gear does a lot of), money made off DLC (the game had a lot of it to make money off of), and so on.

There's no way with all that the game wasn't profitable. And even if it wasn't, that was to be blamed on the engine, not the game development, of which Konami could probably make a profit off of just by selling out the rights to use it in games to other studios (like, for example, the Havok, Source and Unreal Engines).

Here's the secret about the global market in publicly and privately traded companies: it is all about keeping the stockholders' happy. That's why companies offer annual, bi-annual, and even quarterly dividends to stockholders. That's why companies put out quarter, bi-annual and annual reports covering all kind of details.

Now, let us put that to use with a video game industry example. When investors talk about Capcom "falling off" a few years ago as a company, they don't mean Capcom games sold worse, are less fun to play, or don't make a big splash. No, what investors mean is Resident Evil 6 had unrealistically high sales and revenue expectations, and it did not meet them whatsoever..

Because of that and the estimate-based world that investing is, that caused Capcom's stock prices to drop. Stockholders for some reason thought Resident Evil 6 was going to cause Capcom's value to skyrocket and thus the company would become very profitable. Instead, the game made a hefty but not mind-shattering profit, Capcom grew in value by a decent amount, and stockholders freaked out and Capcom's stock prices dropped incredibly low, to where the company had to downsize, and essentially hit the "reset button" with investors.

The stock market is like watching gazelles run and rampage like idiots (which is why I generally stick to investing in large companies with huge dividends for my long-term investments). They saw "one game under-performs and thus the whole company's video game brand is dying" (not a loss, not an IP dies, merely it under-performs), and BANG! Huge stock market price dive. Often actually, in the short term (1 year or less) investments, one of the best bets to make a good amount of money is to buy stocks in a company that shareholders freak out about after a quarterly report, and then sell it when everyone gets their brains together and the stock value goes up to level up where it should be (I basically funded building my entire PC because of an incident with this last year in an overreaction that was super obvious).

Like money, the value of stocks is all mental. And if stockholders are freaking out and selling low because they're reactionary idiots, then that can derail a company to make its' value than what it should be, or they freak out and overvalue a company (think Apple marketing hype to an extent), and suddenly a company is always growing. Perceptions and expectations dictate the value of a company in the eyes of the stock market, and very often they are unreasonable.

This kind of environment is bad for video games, and we've seen it time and time again. That's why, when after a few titles under-performed (MGS Peace Walker on the PSP initially [the 360 and PS3 ports did quite well], random games I don't remember, PES losing a lot of sales to FIFA, new Bomberman games not selling because they're boring and don't do anything new, and having unrealistic expectations for Castlevania spin-offs to sell better than main series Castlevania titles), Konami's stockholders forced the Executive branch be cleaned out, scraped the entire Castlevania and Bomberman series into the garbage, and got a CEO with underlings who wanted to focus on the gambling industry and the whaling part of the mobile market (yes they openly stated that).

It wasn't intelligence or long-term planning, it was short-term fear and shortsightedness. Let us not confuse that with intelligent decision making.

Once more, they also look too heavily at Japanese sales, rather than global scales. Too often with Japanese companies with old "know-it-all" investors look only at what is happening in Japan with their company, and not at the world. This sometimes creeps into their day-to-day business operations.

The company my father currently works for is a Japanese private company that for 40 years has led their industry in Japan, yet for a long time was hardly a bleep on this particular industry's radar because it only did business in Japan. Despite not expanding operations or even discussing it for a few decades, the stockholders were happy. Then about 15 years ago the company expanded operations into various other parts of Asia, and within a few years they doubled their company's value and annual revenue. Yet, the stockholders were unhappy, because Japanese profits were 5% lower than the previous year.

Instead of being rational, the minority stockholders were gazettes, and sold all their shares to the primary stockholder. Ever since then, the company has expanded its' operations to cover many markets around the world, and has grown in value a few times over.

That is what Konami's stockholders are doing. They are being shortsighted and thinking about primarily Japan's game industry (where home consoles are dead and PC gaming doesn't have a market, and video games are either played in specific niche arcades, handheld consoles, or mobile devices), and are thinking about capturing the market of their peers (paschinko machines).

If anything, that is a risk. Very few mobile games even make money let along make a profit (there are very few examples of mobile games that do, although the ones that do basically print money), and the legality of various gambling-related activities and business even in Japan is always up in the air.

There is an intelligent part of possibly doing this from Konami's stockholders, and that may be that they are specialists in those markets (paschinko machines/gambling and the mobile market). That's basically the only reason I could think of that, but even then starting a new company from scratch would be a better, safer investment rather than entirely changing a current company all at once.

They are losing out on the expanding market for video game-centric merchandise. Metal Gear makes so much money off of merchandise because it has so much, and the way each game is made is to create the want for that from the consumers. Cutting that off by appealing to glorified slot machines (which is mostly an older, shrinking, possibly Japan-only crowd), if that is what they do (and not continuing to make quality Metal Gear games that produce this kind of content), is straight up burning revenue.

Also, for the record Kojima wasn't fired. In the proceedings of kicking out all the console and PC development studios (such as the Castlevania staff), Kojima Productions was able to retain their name and rights to their brand (likely because the name comes from the studio head Hideo Kojima's last name). Because of that, the studio was merely removed as a part of Konami, and became an independent studio (Kojima Productions LA was less fortunate, as the studio was closed and several dozen people lost their jobs).

For trying to say you have that much of a point though, you should have at least gotten that part right.