PlatinumGames plans to self-publish its own IP
Currently focused on "two designs."
PlatinumGames is planning to self-publish its own mid-size IP, as well as continue to work on bigger titles for third-party publishers, studio head of development and producer Atsushi Inaba told Game Informer.
“One of the things Platinum is focused on is we’re looking into creating our own IP, creating our own game,” Inaba told Game Informer. “Up until now, obviously we’ve worked on original IPs for a wide variety of publishers. We’ve also worked on other Hollywood IPs for other publishers as well. But we’re becoming more and more interested in the idea of self-publishing and doing our own title.”
According to Inaba, over the last year the company was opened up to allow anyone to pitch a game, and after drilling through about 70 design documents, it is now at “two designs that we’re genuinely focused on.”
“We can’t put together a AAA, $10 million-plus game, because we just don’t have that sort of cash as an independent developer,” Inaba said. “However, we don’t plan to go the indies route with just a few people on a team making a game, so it’ll be somewhere in the middle, looking at probably about 20 people on the staff making the game, so that’ll still be a healthy [size].”
Inaba clarified that just because PlatinumGames will start to self-publish its own IP, it will continue to make bigger games for third-party publishers.
“We will continue to do AAA 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,” Inaba said. “In order to do a AAA title with that amount of risk, you need to be with a big company, a publisher so to speak. We don’t think that us doing self-published titles, just based on the scope and scale of what they are, is going to interfere with relationships with other publishers because, again, the style and the size and scope of games that we do with them is going to be much bigger compared to this to the point where they realize we’re not really competing in the same markets.
“Doing something on our own, self-publishing it, releasing it, all of that is a challenge for us, but right now everybody is incredibly motivated and working on that. So all the fans, anybody who looks at the website or reads the magazine, look forward to something cool in the future from Platinum.”