Silent Hill Revival Required No Wait-and-See, Konami Producer Says at CEDEC 2026

The CEDEC 2026 lecture also covered the practical challenges of global development. Assistant producer Taiki Matsuo said that when working with Poland's Bloober Team on the Silent Hill 2 remake, the team standardized processes such as proposal documents, Game Design Documents, milestone definitions, and vertical slices. That experience carried over to later projects with Screen Burn in Scotland and NeoBards in Taiwan.

Matsuo identified one specific pitfall: a difference in thinking about quality at the master submission stage for platform certification. Konami wanted maximum quality at that point, while the developer aimed to submit early and improve with a Day 1 Patch. The team resolved it by documenting the quality line for the first master submission early in development. "I felt it was necessary to clarify the criteria for the first master submission early in development. I think this is a pitfall that occurs when doing global development for the first time," Matsuo said.

Communication was another hurdle. None of the three producers speak English, and about 80% of the 15-person production team cannot speak English either. Meetings with English-speaking studios require interpretation and take two to three times longer. Text communication uses machine translation. Okamoto said, "Global development doesn't mean you can't do it without English." He argued that the ability to choose from 10 or 20 times more development companies overseas outweighs the language barrier.

For Silent Hill f, producer Okamoto chose writer Ryukishi07 because he had read over 90% of Ryukishi07's entire bibliography. Okamoto said game producers should read books: when commissioning a writer, one should read at least a majority of their works to understand both strengths and weaknesses. The team's scenario staff are expected to read 100 to 200 novels a year, and the office has a book corner.

Okamoto described the core concept of the revived series as "psychological horror," treating Silent Hill as a phenomenon that can occur anywhere rather than a fixed location. He said the decline in sales of the old series was due to "people getting bored" with similar settings, gameplay, and stories.