bitbydeath
Member
Sony doesn't need to jump in for anything. They have barely anything to do with this guy, other than hosting one of his games on PS5 and having published a random post on their blog and a 30 seconds nothing-video on their YouTube channel. He's a third party developer, unless he does something illegal, breaks their internal terms and conditions (which I don't know) or behaves in a way that is highly damaging for the PlayStation brand, what do they even care. They possibly even already told him to take it down a notch, which is why he posted this:
You are assuming people at PlayStation are super-involved with him, but they really aren't. Also, Sony has been very very silent in the past couple of years and made almost a point to never respond directly to rumors, no matter how insistent or serious they are, not even ones related to their own hardware or IPs. Imagine how much of a shit they give if a random indie dude with a PS5 devkit enters the spotlight for a week or two over nothing.
As for Konami, they are a dying company which has become legendarily bad at brand managing and communication. They keep pushing Silent Hill-related merch and minor collaborations left and right, but then they do nothing else with the IP. Every time people are SURE it must mean they are about to announce a new game, Konami plays around with it for a couple of weeks, and then nothing happens. And even if they knew what they are doing, it's all free advertisement for them and their IP. They did nothing. They didn't need to do anything. But all of a sudden Silent Hill is once again talked about by anyone.
Quite some years back, a random guy led the entire Fallout community by the nose for several days pretending to be somebody from Bethesda and posting cryptic messages hinting at the announcement of Fallout 4 (of course I'm talking long before the real Fallout 4 was actually developed by Bethesda). This strange "marketing campaign" was widely reported by gaming media, he posted a few encrypted messages that were deciphered over time by the community, until at some point either he got bored of it or ran out of ideas on what to say next, and just made a post to state "Sorry, I'm not actually Bethesda, I was pulling your leg. Fuck you if you have a problem with that, and goodbye".
Bethesda said absolutely nothing during or after the event, because why would they? It was all free advertising, they would take zero blame from it all, and it was a free chance to gauge the interest for people over a new Fallout game.
I don't think it started from him, he was just super-misterious and vague about his game (probably because it's shovelware shite and he knows it), other people made the Kojima connection first. But then he started dancing around it, changed his YouTube banner to the misty hills, published the "Abandoned = S_____L" tweet, and at that point he KNEW what he was doing.
Then either he himself panicked or Sony/Konami gave him a call, and he very quickly put out a statement to distance himself from Konami or thier IPs. But at that point it was too late already, people entered full Cognitive Bias Mode, completely rejected any notion pointing at him just being a random unknown developer, and dug to find literally anything, no matter how absurd or cherry-picked, to cling onto the notion of him being connected somehow to Kojima and Silent Hill.
Some people won't listen to reason no matter what because they are not trying to figure out what is real, they actively want to convince themselves of what they wish to be real. If somebody completely spontaneously made the mental leap "Shit nothing-game from unknown studio is advertised once by PlayStation = iT mUsT bE kOJimA!!!!" and enough people went with it with zero additional initial evidence, you get an idea of the predisposition of all of these poeple.
They’ve been known to jump in for less, it would be expected for them to set expectations.
I feel like you’re not up on everything here and that’s fine, not long to go now anyway!