Platinum Games, the developers behind Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, spoke of their desire to develop their own, original IP last year. In a new interview with Game Informer, their co-founder Atsushi Inaba says the company are in fact working on two new IPs, which they also plan to self-publish.
Ones to watch for our list of exciting upcoming PC games.
That would be a first for Platinum, who have generally licensed other IPs and worked with larger publishers to bring them to market.
Platinum have allowed all team members to pitch ideas for their own game – a challenge to which their staff have risen admirably, producing 70 design documents. Inaba says “we want to motivate the people that work here. We want to give them an opportunity to make their own game.” As a result, Platinum now have “two designs that we’re genuinely focused on.”
With a team of roughly 20 people, expect these designs to occupy the space between indie and triple-A – a field that has been fallow in recent years, but which more mid-sized developers are looking to target after the success of titles such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.
“We can’t put together a triple-A, $10 million-plus game, because we just don’t have that sort of cash as an independent developer. However, we don’t plan to go the indies route with just a few people on a team making a game.”
Inaba acknowledges that “when people think of the Platinum Games brand, they expect crazy hardcore action,” and assures fans that the new IPs will deliver the bombastic, wacky experience for which his company has become known.”We want to surprise them by the fact that we’re doing this independent title and hopefully get support from the fanbase. But we don’t want to surprise them by, say, doing a princess-clothing-making game.”
None of these ambitions will crowd out Platinum’s traditional method of partnering with publishers to make larger games, however: “We will continue to do triple-A games for other publishers, and that’s because, again, we don’t have the cash flow to take on the risk to only do self-published games.” We know a new Nier game is in the works, and Bayonetta 3 is currently in production for Nintendo Switch. We got a PC version of the original, so it’s not out of the question that it comes to our platform.