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***Update 1 – 2015-07-27 -22:56 CEST***

We just received an answer from Rika Muranaka via Twitter. And this is what Muranaka had to say at this time:

“Hi =) I´m sorry to disturb you, but could you perhaps answer some questions about Kojima´s payments at Konami, and the music that you made for the MGS series? ” – Robin Ek, TGG

“Huh? I don’t know about payment ? he worked for the company meaning he will get monthly salary..I get production budget for whole entire game for musicAnd after that I can not tell u”

“I didn’t want codec to misunderstood me…I said Hideo is getting paid monthly salary n that’s what he gets n he is happy” – Rika Muranaka

Sadly enough, this is all the info that we’ve been told. Well, At least for now. So It´s hard to tell if Daley (the Co-host of The Codec Podcast) was telling the truth or not. And speaking of Rika Muranaka, she just told me that she will attend to the InternationalFPS event in Flordia (which starts in 18 days from now).

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Daley, Co-host of The Codec Podcast, claims he has been part of an interview with the series’ former composer Rika Muranaka. Apparently, she said the reason Konami and Kojima split is because Kojima was not paid a portion of the profits on game sales, but was instead paid a fixed wage regardless of the success of the game.Which as an employee is the right thing to do, regardless if it’s in bad taste or not.

This is also worth considering that this claim didn’t come directly from Rika, it came from someone who spoke to Rika a while ago and they “remembered” that. So take it with a pinch of salt, eh?

Muranaka has made music for MGS 1-3, Silent Hill 1 and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Here’s an exact transcript of what was said during the podcast.

“The main reason for the falling out, at least in her opinion, is that Kojima gets paid a salary, and doesn’t make any profit share on the game. He gets paid a certain amount no matter what, and he was spending so much money and delaying the project, and adding all these features and making sure the game was the biggest and best thing it could be, and Konami was unhappy with that because [delaying] has no effect on him. He was spending the budget on this and that and upgrading the Fox Engine and then delaying further because the engine wasn’t ready, and Konami wasn’t happy with that because he gets his salary and he takes a more traditional “Japanese man” approach by not taking a profit share. So in doing that, he gets a little more than a game creator would but doesn’t take bonuses from the game selling well…

In her eyes, Kojima’s a fantastic creator, and probably the best creator of his time, but he doesn’t have a strong business sense like Konami would like him to have. Where instead of, for example, cutting corners by lowering foliage resolution, he wants to make sure everything looks as good and polished as possible. She said they paid for her to write 30-40 songs that ended up not being used, and he’d tell her to write another one, then another one, then another one, because he settles for what he likes and has a good mind for what people want to see and what people want to hear…

She’s worked directly with Kojima for the music before so she does have some insight, and personally believes that the music has suffered in MGSV because she’s not a part of it, because they couldn’t afford her. So instead of paying her to go to all these people and recruit them for the music, they chose to remove her from the equation and go to the people directly.”

There’s two ways to look at this. First is the stance that Konami simply didn’t want to give Kojima the funds to make the game to the best of his ability because it’d be too expensive. Konami isn’t in the best financial position right now, so putting all of their funds into something like Metal Gear Solid V would be a potentially unnecessary risk.”

What do you think? Should Kojima have been paid a salary like an employee or should he have been paid royalties even though he was an employee of konami?

Note: We have reached out to Rika Muranaka, but so far she hasn´t given us any comments.

***Jump forward to 1:43:28 for the part about Kojima, MGS and Rika Muranaka***