According to a recent interview with the game's music producer, he now-popular stealth game genre. The long-running franchise's last major installment was 2015's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with Kojima and publisher Konami separating shortly before release.
Kojima's series is known for its revolutionary stealth gameplay, intense boss fights and reduced to a Konami-branded pachinko slot machine, with 2018 zombie survival title Metal Gear Survive being the publisher's only new franchise title without Kojima.
In an interview with Game Developer, Metal Gear Solid 2 music producer Rika Muranaka revealed the series was never meant to continue on for so long. While Kojima created the Metal Gear series and continued to work on it for almost three decades, he never wanted to create a massive franchise on the scale of Final Fantasy. During Muranaka's interview with Game Developer, she explained that Kojima's artistic creativity drove him to pursue brand-new and original gaming projects. However, the financial success of Metal Gear motivated Konami to keep pushing the series ahead, locking the developer in until his departure from the publisher.
While Kojima no longer works on Metal Gear, the industry figure is finding success with other titles. a Kojima game that changes in real time based on whoever's playing it.
Hideo Kojima's reluctance to drag on the Metal Gear series is even clearer with Muranaka's comments, corroborated by the fact that many of its installments have fairly definitive endings. Now that he is free to create whatever games he desires with his own studio, Kojima Productions, Hideo Kojima can have the creative power to make - or not to make - his games a long-running series.
Source: Game Developer
