Cognition Dissemination: Why is Activision Publishing Sekiro, Anyway?

It’s been nearly four months since FromSoftware revealed their next big game: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Instead of making a game that represents the evolution of the so-called Soulsbourne games (which include Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls games, and Bloodborne), this game will have a distinct identity though its setting and gameplay. For instance, the game will have little-to-no RPG elements, and features common to action games like light stealth will be included. The combat will also focus more on parrying attacks, and even smaller enemies hit harder than those in Soulsbourne games. It looked great when they provided an extended preview of it in action.

But there’s one big question about it: Why in the world is Activision publishing it outside Japan? Whenever anyone thinks of Activision these days, it’s usually in relation to Call of Duty and Destiny, their biggest franchises and two of the largest in the world. The company is notorious for narrowly focusing on their AAA properties, and now has several developers who previously worked on their own franchises handling different CoD games.

Activision doesn’t have much else under their own brand, but it’s clear CoD and Destiny are all they need given how they sell, though recent evidence suggests Crash Bandicoot is still popular. They also own Blizzard and King to make money, the former of which has Overwatch, Diablo 3, and the still-popular World of Warcraft, while the latter has the extremely popular Candy Crush Saga and its variants.

So, Sekiro will stick out like a sore thumb among their library, and it’s ostensibly strange how a company that only keeps the biggest AAA franchises around wants to publish a mid-tier game. I’m far from the only one that thinks this, as Google’s search autocomplete shows. There are actually good explanations for why this came to be.

Activision producer Robert Conkey explained to GamesIndustry.biz that “When From Software knocks on your door and says ‘hey, we wanna make a game,’ you have only one answer right?” Right! I’m glad they’re enthusiastic about it, but that still leaves the question of why a company that mainly publishes AAA games would pick this up. A better explanation came from FromSoftware community manager Yasuhiro Kitao, who said they shared Sekiro’s concept with several companies that chose not to bite on it. Fortunately for them, Activision leaped at the chance to publish it after admiring the idea for the project and appreciating FromSoftware’s vision.

Interestingly, this means their previous publishing partners either didn’t approach them, or chose to pass on it. They may not have wanted Sony to publish it, since that would have entailed making it a PlayStation 4-exclusive, though Bloodborne shows how they’re not averse to console exclusives. But it also means Bandai Namco passed, which seems peculiar on the surface. This is likely due to the company currently being concerned with their own Souls-like game, Code Vein, which has been dubbed “anime Souls” in some circles. Code Vein was delayed from the last week of September to sometime early next year for polishing, but it will be humorous if this game and Sekiro release close to each other as a result.

The Activision and FromSoftware bromance makes much more sense after hearing about what Sekiro was planned to be in its earliest development stages. The game has similarities to FromSoftware’s old Tenchu ninja stealth series because it was going to be a revival of that franchise when they took it to Activision. Notably, Activision published the first three mainline Tenchu games on PSOne and PlayStation 2 (the fourth was handled by Ubisoft instead), so this is a reunion for both companies.

This would have been the first big Tenchu game FromSoftware handled themselves, since they were mostly developed by Acquire and K2 but published by FromSoftware in Japan. But this game became more of its own thing after the team added more gameplay ideas that would have been incongruent with the Tenchu franchise. Activision was apparently fine with these changes.

(Activision also published the Lost Kingdoms games in the west, two card-based action RPGs for Gamecube. After this deal, it would be fine if they teamed up for another RPG.)

There were several FromSoftware fans concerned about what DLC schemes Activision would have planned for the game when they were confirmed as the publisher, but there doesn’t appear to be anything to worry about… for now. A representative for Step 3, a client of Activision, confirmed that Sekiro won’t have any microtransactions. The downloadable content plans for the game are currently unknown, but hopefully FromSoftware will merely retread prior ground by providing robust content down the line, and leave it at that. They seem to have a good relationship with Activision, so they may not goad them into adding anything they don’t want to this game.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will release on March 22nd for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Kitao previously mentioned that the development team was considering providing beta tests similar to what the Souls games received, and hopefully those come to fruition. It would give everyone curious about it the chance to try it for themselves, even though they may not be a need to test server load thanks to this game being single-player only.