Hideo Kojima has no plans to start a new Western studio

Kojima Productions is back and working on a new game, Death Stranding. Hideo Kojima's new studio is growing, but don't expect his company to expand to the size and the international reach of his former, Konami-owned company.

In an interview with Polygon today, we asked Kojima if he was interested in working closely with a Western studio again, as he did with the Playa Vista, California-based Kojima Productions LA. Probably not, he said.

After the new Kojima Productions was announced in December, "we put out a website for people to send in their applications," Kojima said, "and fortunately people from all over the world applied. I'm in daily interviews with so many people, and I've been doing planning. It's been six months. Now we have our own facilities, a location and we finally have enough manpower enough to put out [the Death Stranding] teaser and do these experiments, these tests I want to do."

In other words, the new Kojima Productions will (hopefully) be an in-house mix of international game developers.

"We want to put out something as handmade as possible."

"About the [Kojima Productions] LA studio, the mission was, at that point, to put something out from the IP line every year," Kojima said. There would be "two [game franchises] running in parallel in Tokyo and LA."

"That is not our current strategy," he said. "We want to put out something as handmade as possible. We're not thinking about [product] lines so much; I'm thinking about our team. I'm not thinking about doing a huge Western studio."

As for how Kojima Productions has grown over the past six months, here's what Kojima had to say.

"I can't say exactly how many we are right now, but when we started up last December it was only four people including me. In a temporary office, all we had was a desk and a seat and a computer and that's it."