Death Stranding 2 and risky game connoisseur Hideo Kojima says too many AAA games play it safe: "If there is no risk, there won't be any good things that would be born"

Hideo Kojima is no stranger to risky games, the type of stuff that's just as likely to inspire loud complaints or heavy confusion as it is to court loads of awards – Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2's fussy cross-country traversal, say. It's not surprising to hear that the famed director recently took shots at the AAA industry's risk-averse product pushing, then.

Speaking to Ssense about this year's annual marketing marathon Summer Game Fest, Kojima felt most of the big-budget fare looked too familiar. "Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same, and a lot of people enjoy this, I understand," he says.

His beef isn't just a personal one, either. Kojima might be personally tired of the sci-fi military shooters and generic dark fantasy action games that tend to pop up at these kinds of showcases, but he also thinks it's good for the industry itself to push boundaries. "It is important to put something really new in there for the industry," he adds. "If there is no risk, there won't be any good things that would be born."

All hope's not lost, though. While the biggest of the big publishers normally play it safe and perpetually reheat their own nachos, Kojima believes indie devs are the ones really pushing the envelope to create more interesting work. Hard to deny when out-of-the-box hits like this year's Blue Prince and Skin Deep prove it, too.

Hideo Kojima learned "so many ways to kill people" in training, says it's "kind of sad" many devs "don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun" despite making military games