Konami president and CEO Hideki Hayakawa doesn’t believe generative AI will turn the video game industry upside down. He expects Konami AI tools to help teams work faster, but says the people making the games will stay at the center of everything the company does.
Hayakawa shared his views in Konami Group’s latest Integrated Report, covering the fiscal year that ended in March 2026. His comments appear in the report’s Digital Entertainment section and were first picked up by Japanese outlet Dengeki Online. The full report is available through Konami’s investor relations site.
“The most important factors in producing entertaining and innovative video games are people and creators.”
Why Konami’s president doesn’t expect AI to change everything
Hayakawa accepts that AI could make game production more efficient. What he doesn’t expect is a drastic change to the market as a whole. In his view, the barrier to making games has already been lowered several times before AI came along.
He pointed to general-purpose engines like Unity and Godot, which made it far easier for small teams to build and ship games. He also mentioned platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, where players use existing tools to create new experiences of their own. In all of those cases, the tools opened the door, but it was still people and their ideas that made the results worth playing.
Hayakawa sees generative AI as the next step in that same pattern rather than a complete break from it.
The “chemical reaction” of team development
The core of Hayakawa’s argument is about teamwork. Modern games are made by large groups of developers, and he believes the mix of backgrounds, skills and perspectives inside those teams is what produces genuinely new ideas.
“That kind of chemical reaction is not something that can be easily replaced.”
That puts him at odds with some of the louder predictions in the industry, where AI is often pitched as a way to cut team sizes or replace parts of the creative process. Hayakawa frames it the other way around: the technology can support creators, but it can’t stand in for them.
Konami AI plans: support, not replacement
None of this means Konami is ignoring the technology. Hayakawa said the company “provides systematic support so that creators can get a grasp of new technologies.” The goal is to help teams understand new tools, judge the risks and use them safely where they fit.
The report doesn’t say which AI tools Konami uses in production or which projects might use them. For now, Konami AI use sounds more like a careful, case-by-case approach than a big push to automate development.
It’s a stance that fits Konami’s recent output. The publisher has leaned heavily on big, creator-driven projects in the past couple of years, including the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. Those games depend on art direction, atmosphere and storytelling, which are exactly the areas where players tend to be most skeptical of AI-generated content.
A wider industry debate
Hayakawa’s comments arrive while publishers are split on how far AI should go in game development. Some companies are openly experimenting with AI for art, voice and code, while many players and developers worry about quality and jobs. AI is also showing up in the tools players use every day, as seen in our coverage of the NVIDIA App’s new AI agent feature.
Konami’s position is a middle ground. It isn’t rejecting AI, but it isn’t treating it as a replacement for developers either. For fans of its biggest series, that’s probably the message they wanted to hear.
