Despite the person raising this as a joke, I did want to chime in about Konami for some context on their current position since they do come up a lot and people might be curious.
Konami is showing signs of being interested in leveraging more of it’s IP for traditional videogames to some extent. I say “more” because they never actually exited traditional videogames, they just slimmed operations down to it’s most profitable core - the soccer/football games, Yu-Gi-Oh, and a smattering of other things that most forum-going hardcore gamers don’t care about.
In 2019, they published a new Contra game developed by an external studio. This was small scale. In 2021, Bloober Team officially signed a deal with Konami to work on a game for them. That’s not a rumour - that was publicly announced (the rumour aspect is that it’s Silent HIll). Bloober works at the high end of AA or very low end of AAA in budget terms, but it is something.
Currently, Konami USA is hiring for a producer with the following description:
This would signal to me that they’re definitely planning to use more external developers to make games, even beyond what is known with Bloober. For like 4+ years now, Sony fans have been memeing or trying to manifest a bunch of Konami IP exclusive games, but in all seriousness, external companies partnering with Konami to develop games based on their IP now seems quite plausible.
As far as internal development, it doesn’t seem like they’re currently moving to expand much. They have internal teams but mostly just for some mobile games, YGO and E-Football (formerly known as Winning Eleven). This isn’t sexy or exciting for people ITT, but it does actually have value potentially. Just probably not nearly enough value to be worth pursuing in favour of the many other options. I don’t think even Sony would have significant enough synergies with the company overall to want to pursue something like this.
OTOH, I do also think they’re now interested enough in re-exploring traditional gaming that the other possibility of them selling off various IPs I think feels very unlikely. Based on their recent history, their hiring and so on, I think they’d rather just dip their toes in as opposed to selling the lot. They still enjoy back catalogue sales of a lot of stuff too, they leverage the IP for secondary things like Pachinko, etc.