Because in an industry dominated by yearly rehashed minimum viable products like CoD or AC or Battlefield or the plethora of lootbox infested live services meant to fuck your wallet for easy quick RoI for shareholders, Kojima spends time and resources creating new, novel ideas and taking the artistic medium (yes, games are art despite what capital G Gamers want to say) to new and exciting and interesting places.
This is why Hideo Kojima, Yoko Taro, Fumito Ueda, Hideaki Itsuno, Keiichiro Toyama, Eric Barone, Terry Cavanagh, David Szymanski (etc etc etc, I could go on) all get name recognition.
People always SAY they want games to expand and try new things/don’t want the same game every year, but then when someone actually tries, the games get panned as “gimmicky” or “niche” or “pretentious” “pixel graphics indie garbage” or some other flavor of the month phrase gamers use to instantly discredit something that doesn’t immediately and specifically cater to every single one of their preconceived demands on what a “game” is and/or should be.
Yeah, I added a few western names too (I’m a bit biased to Japanese devs, growing up on JRPGs and whatnot).
But there’s tons of people over here that get name recognition too, for sure.