Konami Has Staged the Biggest Unlikely Gaming Comeback of 2026

You don’t have to look very hard to find stories about publishers struggling to make ends meet in 2026. Skyrocketing budgets caused by a demand for franchise games to grow bigger and better with every installment have put major players like Sony and Microsoft in a tough spot. But in a sea of business horror stories, one small triumph is starting to emerge in the most unlikely of places: Konami.

After a decade of behind-the-scenes drama that turned a once-powerful publisher into a Pachinko punchline, Konami has begun to rediscover its footing in a real way. A successful Silent Hill 2 remake, quickly followed by the critically acclaimed Silent Hill f, revived an all-but-dead franchise in one year flat, to the tune of millions of units shipped. That strategy has only expanded in 2026, as the double whammy of Silent Hill: Townfall and Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse have proved that Konami has finally cracked the code to restoring the relevancy of its once-great franchises.

While it’s hard to make the same trick work across the board in the video game industry, other publishers may want to take note. Konami is currently laying out a potential vision for an industry that can find success by scaling back instead of going as big as possible.

It’s surprising that this is coming from Konami, considering that the publisher was on the brink of irrelevancy just a decade ago. The publisher’s now infamous fallout with Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima crushed good will from players and stalled any momentum it might have had coming out of its award-winning Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. While Konami didn’t stop making games altogether, its output from 2016 to 2024 wasn’t exactly impressive. Major franchises like Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, and Silent Hill seemed to go dead as sports games and retro rereleases filled in the gaps.

Konami began to show some signs of life in 2023, when the publisher released Super Bomberman R 2 and Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1, but the real sea change came in 2024. Seemingly out of nowhere, Konami revealed its intention to revive Silent Hill, starting with a quick experimental game called Silent Hill: The Short Message. Though it was a critical dud, it doubled as a proof of concept, and Konami made good on its plans later that year with a successful remake of Silent Hill 2. That project wasn’t handled by an internal team at Konami, but by Bloober Team, an indie horror studio that had made a name for itself over the past few years.

Image: NeoBards Entertainment/Konami via Polygon

Two years later, it’s becoming clear that Silent Hill 2 was the start of an even grander strategy. 2025 gave us Silent Hill f, a follow-up helmed by NeoBards Entertainment, a developer who had a history of working with Capcom on games like Resident Evil: Resistance. With Konami’s support and free creative reign over a big IP, NeoBards delivered a radical reimagining of Silent Hill that resonated with fans. What could have been a risky gamble paid off, with the game selling two million units within six months of its release.

From that vantage point, it looks like Konami has cracked a clear strategy: Give the keys to its IP to proven external partners who can make successful installments in a limited scope. You can see that again this year in Silent Hill: Townfall, a very compact Silent Hill game created by Stories Untold developer Screen Burn Interactive. While we’ve yet to get a sense of whether it was a sales success for Konami, the fact that it’s a seemingly smaller scale production gives the publisher much more flexibility than an all-chips-on-the-table production would have.

Now, we’re starting to see that thinking extend to other Konami franchises. This month, Konami published Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, the first original game in the series in over a decade. Development duties were handled by Evil Empire, a small studio that cut its teeth working on Dead Cells and The Rogue Prince of Persia, both of which displayed obvious Castlevania inspirations. Rather than going grand, Evil Empire delivered a tidy 2D action game that has hit with Castlevania fans who were happy to get another classic Metroidvania rather than a major escalation of the franchise.

You can already see a path forward for Konami if it wants to push that momentum even further. Why not give the Castlevania keys to Ender Magnolia developers Adglobe and Live Wire next? Or how about commissioning Team Ladybug, a developer that has proven itself with retro action games like Blade Chimera, to make an even smaller-scale ode to Castlevania’s origins? The future suddenly feels wide open now that there’s not a feeling that every Castlevania game needs to be bigger and more expensive than the last. Maybe it finally makes dollars and cents to wind the clock back and make tentpole games compact again, leaning on smaller developers who know how to deliver a tightly scoped game.

Konami is ahead of the curve with its thinking, but there are signs that other publishers are warming up to that — with mixed success. Sony took a stab at it earlier this year with God of War: Sons of Sparta, a 2D prequel handled by indie developer Mega Cat Studios. It didn’t exactly land to the warmest reception, which might have left Sony with cold feet, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s as costly an error as a game like, say, Concord. Ubisoft and Sega have dipped into that trend too with Prince of Persia and Shinobi, respectively. Suddenly, it feels like franchises that have either fallen by the wayside or only get a new entry once every five or six years are getting more chances for creative reinvention.

Whether that works will no doubt come down to a case by case basis. Konami is currently knocking it out of the park because it keeps pairing the right franchises with the right third-party partners. The games feel scoped around what those studios can realistically deliver rather than matched to the expectation of a mega-budget success. Maybe there’s hope yet that the video game industry can rein itself in and find a sustainable way to keep franchise games alive.