I can't wait for A) Kojima's tell-all about his treatment, and B) his eventual Kickstarter campaign.
Honestly, I feel at this point that a behind-the-scene expose about Phantom Pain would be even more interesting than one about Destiny. It's so weird to think that this project went from its totally bizarre announcement to its heavy-handed corporate controlled final days.
Destiny strikes me as a pretty normal mess.
They started a game with a ton of staff without a clear vision of what they wanted to do, had a planned scope vastly larger than their capabilities, and then were told they had to get the game out within a year of their originally agreed ship date. They followed up by massively cutting content and just trying to ship whatever they had that was polished, reverting to pretty basic game designs to fill in whatever was missing yet felt critical to calling the game a complete product.
If we look at BioShock Infinite, it's a pretty similar story, which is why every time we saw the product, it became more and more like the first game, and the scope was progressively more limited/lacking in the more ambitious features they promised.
But a guy on his position needs to have meetings with his staff, check things, play dev versions,... how can do his work when he stays on his office all day? Do they have the security guards accompany him to every meeting? Actually, how can even direct his own game in that situation? This just dosn't even look crazy, it basically tampering the whole development of the game...
It's obviously an incredibly suboptimal situation. I imagine it's a mix of him just doing what he can and relying on the capabilities of the staff to know what they have to do to finish the product given it was already very far in development by the time this started.
80 million is insane if it is just dev budget .
When you add in marketing (i expect Konami trying not to spend to much) we are looking at over 100 million easy .
For a MGS game that is way to much .
It's about on par with a high end Assassin's Creed. It's obviously too much for what they're doing and the realistic sales expectations based on that, but it's the type of budget that exists. In a normal company you'd amortize that by shipping a sequel in three years that cost half as much and continually getting the benefit of what you built.
I can easily see a publisher being unhappy with the cost, but most either suck it up and make more profitable games afterward using this foundation, or they just shut down the studio in a respectful fashion.