Just to clear up a possible misunderstanding, this isn't an apologia for Kojima so much as a more general blanket statement that happens to involve him as an example. I'm neutral towards him, if anything. For the purposes of this discussion, let's operate under the assumption that he's a complete hack who doesn't know his head from his ass.
It can go either way. Being a slave to one's own whims is no more or less deleterious to the overall creative process than being a slave to commercial and/or social/political imperatives. If self-indulgence is masturbatory, servility to commercial demands can just as easily be called prostitutional. One has to pick one's poison, so to speak, and I'm in favor of encouraging the choice either way rather than denying it. The consequences will be whatever they'll be, and that's fine too.
Existence within the commercial space of art and entertainment industries is more about politicking, nepotism, and marketing savvy than the sort of meritocracy you imagine it to be, which hasn't really existed since the 70s or thereabouts. Maybe the early 00s if we're being extremely generous. On the topic of respect, on the contrary, I don't think any artist deserves to be respected, in fact, most people should spit upon most artists by default. It's the artist's lot in life to be spat upon and denigrated, whether they deserve it or not (they usually do regardless of what kind of work they produce). You wouldn't respect a masturbator and you wouldn't respect a prostitute, same goes for both underground and mainstream artists. To be an artist (which I have to reitirate can be a shitty one or a great one in this context) is to be a sinner, regardless of how successful, well-made, or socially acceptable one's art is.
On a side note, Vonnegut's writing is actually fairly tame, even somewhat conventional and bland if you dig further than the cutesy, cartoonish, aspects of it.
When it comes to big-budget, highly commercial productions, the irony of your consumer-oriented take here is that's where it's easiest for hacks to prosper and even run roughshod over consumers in spite of all the oversight you'd assume should go into anything that costs so much money to produce and market. Taking Kojima as an example, the market has decided that his name and the prima donna attitude you hate so much, which his name is synonymous with, is a hot commodity at this point in his career. By your logic the commercial space itself has rewarded him for being a hack and he gave the space itself what it wanted. Is this the beginning of his downfall? Maybe, maybe not, it doesn't matter to me either way, but the fact of the matter is that a man who you consider to be a talentless hack fraud who writes on a middle school level was given millions of dollars to jerk off with by the very commercial space you hold in such high esteem.
I think the real issue here is in the disconnect between commercial viability, market demand, and audience reactions. If recent years should've taught us anything, it's that this isn't a direct or instantaneous pipeline and that all sorts of things that are bemoaned will continue to be made for years on end regardless of consumer reactions so long as there's a vested interest in maintaining the status quo that caused those negative reactions. Sure, there's a breaking point to artificially sustained demand but by the time it's reached you'll have had at least 5 years of shit shoveled down your throat by the market that was ostensibly supposed to cater to your demands.
I don't see it as an issue of ego vs humility or even art vs commerce because all of those things can, have, and will be subverted to suit whatever purpose whoever's employing them wants them to. You seem to have romanticized the notion of the audience into something that's immune to having unwanted things shoved down it's throat by market and socio-political forces beyond its control. My take isn't that hacks are good or that leaving everyone to their own devices will necessarily result in anything better, it's more that everyone involved on every level of every creative endeavor, from the artist, to the editor, to the audience, and any middleman inbetween any of them is far more incompetent, fallible, and easily corrupted than you'd like to think they are.
You can pick. Kojima is in an intensely commercial space which the audience has specific demands of you. Kojima created a genre, and for that I give him props. But he's created expectations in a commercial space and has (more or less) followed them. He's always been cheeky about who you're playing or the story, but the gameplay (for the most part) has been solid.
The problem with this time is that he's basically flouted audience expectation by lying to his audience. I don't believe for a second that his vague intentions were not knowing what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was already prepared with 'You just don't get it' out of the gate. He can flout expectations and do something different, but in this sort of atmosphere, you don't lie about it.
And of course in a commercial market, hacks are king. Because its the money that matters, not the art. I don't really hold the space in any sort of esteem. It is what it is. I'm talking about the person who spends $60 on it or spends the money. I mean, worse people have been given more money to produce worse shit. The problem I have is that you can see through these people and most of them don't pretend to be some artistic genius. They know exactly what they're doing. Kojima pretends to be above all that, when in reality, he's just the same. I just don't think lying to your audience and manipulating them can be excused so simply as just 'oh, I was doing art'. Like you said, this is a commercial space, where hack frauds are king. My thing is Kojima is pretending he's someone he's not, proceeded to lie to people in order to profit. So to me, he's not a genius he's just another fucking hack relying on old nostalgia to sell copies rather than try to be honest and risk losing an audience.
Because Kojima is quirky Japanese man, he gets away with it in the eyes of some people because he's not like Todd Howard or Bobby Kotick. And of course they are. I'm just tired of bullshit artists and pretend geniuses. But the gaming community and its fandom are fucking nauseating and perpetuate this shit, so I'm not shocked by it.
The Kojima worship has always made me roll my eyes though, because I've always known he was pure garbage (This is an extremely, minority opinion in the gaming community. I am aware). But the outright lying he did with this game and the pass he gets for it when others would have been eviscerated for it pisses me off. And I'm always pissed by good concepts being ruined by people. But really, any concept by Kojima is going to get ruined because all Kojima can write is exposition. He can build a world, but for the life of him does not understand how to use it effectively without bluntly explaining every single thing and emotion.
"Gameplay was still sorting itself out" like we have mastered video games and there is a formula you can follow to make a good video game, which I assume has something to do with loops because loops are all anyone ever talks about these days. You may not remember this, but there was a time when people laughed at the very idea of a stealth game - 'lol let's play a game where you don't shoot people, how fun!'
Anyway I don't disagree with you regarding kojima needing an editor, but that is Sony's failing, not his. They gave him an unlimited budget and no oversight, and when he went into the Sony offices and said 'haha me make big times clazy game wit hirarious ploduct pracement serring sungrasses and cans of poison' they said 'great! Put all this Sony shit in there too' instead of 'knock it off idiot'.
An artist makes art. Nothing else is required of them. They can be crazy, vain, greedy, stupid, vicious - art doesn't just need adversity, it needs you to put everything you have into it, including your fuck ups and personal failings. It is the editor's job to make it palatable.
The thing was that there were stealth games before Kojima, but they were extremely badly implemented, implemented as an after-thought or faced the limitations of technology. Kojima basically codified the genre itself, got around these limitations and made something fun and engaging with a decent story for the time period. Obviously there exists no formula and Kojima took a long time to build this, but it was innovative.
The problem is there's nothing innovative about Death Standing's game play. Its a bad physics walking simulator with a complete narrative disconnect to game play. Kojima hasn't done anything revolutionary here. He's been dishonest with the audience and has made trash and is now whining people don't 'get it'.
Oh, it is Kojima's failing as well. An artist needs to recognize when his project is getting away from him. Excellent creators always have people they go to when they realize this. There's a lot of reasons why creative teams stick together closely, for one because their ideas work well with each other and they're also able to curb each others excesses. All art has excesses and you need someone else to take a look and cut it down. This is almost always the case, with the exception being genius level, legendary artists which are few and far between. Kojima bought into his own genius, didn't think he needed one, and fucked up. He has no one to blame but himself. You can give Sony some flack for not recognizing Kojima needs a handler or an editor, but the responsibility is entirely on Kojima. He needed someone to either reign him in or tell him to be honest and that if he was doing something different, fucking with people would only earn them bad will.
I mean, they're required to not be a fucking hack. I would say that's a basic minimum standard. But besides, yes, editors are needed and editors do create adversity or challenge. They challenge the nature of art, to cut it down and help form it. It might not be adversarial, but its a critical process that's almost always required. A failure to recognize that you need this process is a failure of an artist. Of course, you also need a competent editor as well. Not an idiot. Editors can fuck up works a lot too.
Sony desperately wanted Kojima, so they had already conceded total creative control to him. There's really nothing they can do if they've already handed over control as part of a deal, only make recommendations. They could have recommended Kojima get an editor or a writing team, but he could have easily just rejected them outright or Sony just be too hesitant to do so because they'd put all this money on this fucking idiot's ideas.
You can say Sony takes the blame for giving him total control without expectations, but its ultimately Kojima's entire vision and his responsibility at the end of the day. Sony cannot give an editor to someone they've already given total freedom to. Kojima, however, could have taken one on. It isn't like he worked in a bubble before. Its Kojima's failure to recognize that he needed one, and obviously a continual one, regarding his extremely arrogant statements and suppositions.
To be fair, its also the fault of some of his most ardent supporters in sucking his dick that he bought into his own genius to the level and extent he did.
This might sound exceedingly obscure here but...
Is it possible that Death Stranding might be the video game equivalent of Fernando Pessoa's 'book of disquiet'?
I'd say it's closer to American Psycho (the book, not the movie version) in that an extremely uncharitable take on it would be "A laundry list of brand names that's sometimes broken up by inane edgy rambling." Though it's obviously not a perfect comparison either way. The Book of Disquiet is more of an equivalent to the "my diary, tbh" shitpost that used to be popular on /lit/ a couple of years back.
Far closer to Book of Disquiet. But to be fair, it was published after he was dead. I find it kind of hard to shit on a book published posthumously, because someone else had to look at it and go, 'yeah this is good, lets do it'. Kojima is very much alive and very much has his head up his own ass.
Oh, and American Psycho is nowhere NEAR as bad as some others. Try to get through William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'. Every brand is described in aching fucking detail like he was looking through a catalog. I had to stop a third of the way through because I couldn't fucking take the endless brand descriptions down to stitching and color. Yeah, I get that its a future dystopia about brands and the metaphor and all but CAN YOU PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST GET TO THE FUCKING POINT. I came to read a sci-fi novel, not a fucking fashion blog, Jesus.
www.youtube.com
). Because it's not like this is the same medium that had Shadow of the Colossus which contained no spoken dialogue. 
