It's been a year full of ups and downs for Konami who just recently released Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain to rave reviews from both critics and consumers alike. Though the game has been selling extremely well, the company has been under a microscope due to its very public feud with legendary developer, Hideo Kojima. While Konami has confirmed that the series will continue on without Kojima, public perception has not been favorable through all the rebranding efforts and game cancellations like Silent Hills.

Through Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain's bittersweet success, Konami has been rumored to be halting development work on AAA titles going forward, focusing mainly on the pachinko and mobile games market instead. While this rumor has been denied on multiple occasions, odd behavior and events such as Fox Engine lead Julien Merceron leaving the company, continue to perpetuate these beliefs.

As reported initially by Silicon Era, Konami has filed a trademark for the term 'Big Boss' through their pachinko company in Japan. The term 'Big Boss' is the name of the lead character in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, though it's unclear if this trademark is related to that game in some way or just maintenance. Additionally, this filing could be related to a new pachinko related machine focusing on the character or the Metal Gear series in general considering it comes from Konami's pachinko subsidiary.

According to reports, the trademark filing covers everything from slot machines, card games, pachinko, board games, medal games to the more generic 'games' term. Until Konami officially details the filing, fans are left to speculate.

Even though a Konami service representative has come out and confirmed that the company is not leaving AAA games behind, this report appears to be heavily focused around Konami's desire to enter the pachinko market. Even though the trademark covers a lot of general material such as games, the fact that the filing came from their pachinko subsidiary company is telling.

While fans continue to wait for any hints of meaningful DLC such as the cut story content, Metal Gear Online, the player versus player component of The Phantom Pain, is now finally available for consoles today. Fans will be able to take part in a few different multiplayer modes such as the team focused Bounty Mode where killing more enemies puts a bigger bounty price on a players head. Alternatively, players will be able to participate in more objective based game modes such as Comm Control and Cloak and Dagger as well.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain as well as Metal Gear Online are now available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. The PC version of MGO is coming this January.

Source: Silicon Era