P.T. was back in the news, or at least the rumour mill for a bit.
One French outlet began spreading supposed insider information about Kojima's 'firing' from Konami being due to misappropriating MGSV's budget to develop P.T. in secret without Konami knowing.
Kojima Productions released a brief statement denying this.
"KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS normally does not comment on rumors or speculation, however we can confirm that the article recently posted on http://Gameblog.fr is categorically false." - Jay Boor, Global Head of Marketing and Communications https://twitter.com/KojiPro2015_EN/stat ... 9297775616Jay Boor was the recent ex-Konami UK PR hire who previously handled marketing Silent Hill and Metal Gear for Konami.
When the rumor first began it was clearly nonsense, because it essentially claimed that Kojima managed to secretly get Del Toro and Norman Reedus on board and even promote the title of Konami's own channels, including internal company tech demos and monitoring software to check how people were playing and reacting to P.T. on Social Media, which would require many staff members and lots of paperwork to do without Konami's permission or any of the higher ups at Konami knowing under a fake shell company. Which is extremely implausible.
Also we knew as early as the announcement of MGSV and the development of the FOX Engine that the then-President of Konami actually approached Kojima to consider making Silent Hill on the FOX Engine. And Kojima, being a vice-president at the time wouldn't have any trouble securing funding for internal proof of concept ideas that are routinely pitched.
The closest to a credible conspiracy theory revolving around P.T. and Kojima was Great Debate's series who believed that Kojima already had P.T. ready to go, but some about-faces were occurring at Konami to shift to mobile and who wanted to delay or cancel Silent Hills and pull MGSV's development plug, so they might've wanted P.T. not to be released at the time, but Kojima went behind them and released it anyway, then used the social media and audience metrics to convince Konami to keep the project going.
Also, while Kojima knew his time at Konami was limited, as evidenced by the DLC for Ground Zeroes that had people erasing his games, there was no evidence that he already had a gig lined up to start Kojima Productions, as for at least a year according to Kojima he had no idea what he was going to do, his family was not keen on the idea of him going independent, and he was only considering beginning a small indy outlet until Del Toro, Andy House and others encouraged him to aim at AAA.
It would also not explain why so many other KojiPro staff, like Shinkawa and Aki Saito and others also left Konami if it was only Kojima being fired for misappropriation of funds.
The rumour also involved some other MGSV claims that there was no 'chapter 3' and that Survive was a DLC concept etc. So while the tweet is a broad denial, it's most likely addressing specifically the P.T. claims of misusing funds and setting up fraudulent shell companies, because KojiPro have never bothered addressing other rumours about MGSV's chapter 3 or other cut content or anything to do with Survive.
A second tweet for clarification also came out saying they're willing to be more elaborate on details if a more credible source was involved, so maybe, Vixx here can contact Jay Boor for the inside story on P.T.?
https://twitter.com/KojiPro2015_EN/stat ... 9415076864