Speaking on the opening day of last weekend’s Eurogamer Expo, at Earl’s Court, London, Hideo Kojima confirmed that his newly-formed L.A. studio is currently working on development of a new Metal Gear Online franchise.

Of course, Metal Gear Online already had a previous iteration, now defunct, a fact that Kojima put down to a lack of appeal to Western users.

“MGO was really popular in Japan, there were a lot of people who spent a lot of time on it, but it wasn’t quite as popular in The Americas or in Europe,” said Kojima, speaking through a translator. “Of course, I’m the one who came up with the original idea and concept for MGO and supervised it, but I left all of the actual creation to the staff and of course most of them are Japanese. The system and games rules that they came up with were primarily targeted at Japanese users.”

Kojima went on to point out that the franchise isn’t dead, however, and the next version of Metal Gear Online could be developed in L.A. with a view to aiming it specifically at American and European gamers.

“As you know MGO has ceased service as of this time but we’re always looking forward to what’s coming next and I think for the next implementation of an online component, we’re looking to have it be accepted more in Europe and The Americas. So rather than develop it in Japan, we’re looking at developing it in our L.A. studio.”

With the burgeoning popularity of MMOs and the strength of the MGS brand, it’ll be interesting to see how a new MGO property impacts on the genre’s current stalwarts.