I jokingly made a comment about this on the thread about Kojima's going away party yesterday, but the more I think about it, the better it sounds:

Like everyone else in the world that isn't defending Konami as being super-smart businessmen (which sounds a lot like a "don't hate the player, hate the game" argument to my ears), I'm pretty distressed about all of the chaos around Silent Hills being cancelled. This has only been compounded by Guillermo del Toro's recent announcement that they were working with Junji Ito on the project.

I'm a big fan of the original Siren and its remake and playing Until Dawn recently reminded me a lot of Siren's ensemble cast. Also Siren was created by Keiichiro Toyama who created Silent Hill in the first place and is still employed at Sony.

Would there be a better situation than for Sony to put these four guys together as soon as Kojima's noncompete contract runs out and have them start working on a new entry in the Siren franchise?

EDIT: Also, I just found out that Toyama worked on Snatcher with Kojima.

Siren won't sell enough to justify those three dudes being involved. Riskier than brushing a shark's teeth. I feel like if Kojima's next thing is to be a success, it needs to be wholly his thing without some hollywood element. Even with his name, any new thing brings risk so he needs to do something smaller that will resonate with whatever audience he's after.

@shindig: I think there's always a chance with the right marketing. Even though Siren's not a super-hot IP, they can treat the whole thing as a reboot just like Silent Hills seemed to be. Remember, P.T. wasn't even associated with the IP originally and look how well received that was.

Can Sony afford Kojima? I think they are still kinda in the shitter when it comes to overall cash. I mean Im sure they could afford him, but I dont think they would want to spend the money. Esp if MGS4 doesnt even turn a profit. I heard it had a ways to go to get in the black.

I don't think anybody big would trust Kojima with their money. I certainly wouldn't. I hope someone does and he keeps making brilliantly detailed games.

I feel like Sony is still willing to take at least some risks for the sake of having quality, unique games on their consoles and isn't always motivated by per-project ROI.

I understand that with companies like Activision and Ubisoft milking their safest IPs dry with yearly releases, we aren't seeing a ton of risk in AAA, but I'm sure there are still some publishers out there willing to work with him. It's true that the less risk-averse ones don't have the budgets for big-name Hollywood actors, buy I'm pretty sure that Kojima is capable of smaller projects than MGSV.

This is pure speculation, but since Kojima wanted out of Metal Gear since Snake Eater, I my guess is that he would have been willing to scale down if Konami had given him more creative freedom, but since he was stuck working on the series year after year, he felt that he really had to top the previous entries each time.