Cognition Dissemination: Is PlatinumGames Okay?

PlatinumGames has received a solid amount of support from publishers and a reliable fanbase since their inception nearly eleven years ago.

It was established by developers who left shuttered Capcom subsidiary Clover Studio, who released a steady amount of titles within their criminally short three-year lifespan. This included four Viewtiful Joe games, Okami, and God Hand, several of which had another thing in common. Outside the first two Viewtiful Joe titles, none were commercial hits — at least, not initially. Okami was known as the “Least commercially successful winner of a Game of the Year award” from the Guinness World Records, though it’s sold well since its initial PlayStation 2 release thanks to the remastered version being ported to several platforms.

At the company, the team has released several well-received games through publishers like the Bayonetta titles, Anarchy Reigns, Vanquish, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and NieR: Automata. Several of those performed well at retail, so it seemed they had a good future ahead for themselves.

Outside Shinji Mikami’s team leaving the company following Vanquish’s release to form Tango Gameworks (who went on to handle The Evil Within and its sequel), business at the company seemed fine despite some games not performing well. There’s recently been cause for concern about their future output, as issues have been piling up over the last few years.

The first warning sign emerged when company CEO Tatsuya Minami resigned in April 2016, though while it caught some eyebrows, there was little concerned about the ramifications of this. Several more took notice when Scalebound was cancelled at the start of 2017, though it wasn’t clear whether Microsoft or PG was responsible for what went wrong behind the scenes, though it could have been a mixture of both.

In 2018, Lost Order, a mobile real-time strategy title being developed in cooperation with director Yasumi Matsuno, character designer Akihiko Yoshida, and Cygames, went missing. Their other mobile title, World of Demons, was soft-launched in a few territories last year in cooperation with DeNa, but was never released anywhere else. Its official website disappeared sometime late last year. Notably, both games are still listed among PG’s software lineup.

This was bad enough, but their troubles have continued into this year. It was confirmed two weeks ago that Cygames and PG ended their development partnership with Granblue Fantasy: Relink, after PG worked on the game for around three years. Cygames is now handling development internally, and though the companies worded their press releases to make it appear they parted ways amicably, it was clear something went down when PG’s name was removed from the game’s official website.

This brings us to the most recent issue, which involves the departure of Bayonetta 2 director Yusuke Hashimoto. He was previously thought to be directing Bayonetta 3, a title announced with partner Nintendo at The Game Awards in 2017 that it still hasn’t been shown. Nintendo confirmed that it’s still in development during the latest Nintendo Direct, though its prolonged development time was enough to suspect it was going through hurdles behind the scenes. Hashimoto confirmed he left PG at the end of January after fans noticed that mention of his connection the company had been scrubbed from his Twitter account, which only made those concerns intensify.

Don’t forget about Babylon’s Fall, a title being developed with Square Enix announced for PS4 and PC at E3 last June. It hasn’t been shown or mentioned since, and no one even knows what kind of game it is. It was announced with a 2019 release timeframe, but the chances of that will continue dropping the longer we go without a reveal.

This is a lot. Unfortunately, there aren’t any hard answers as to why they’re in this current predicament. It’s possible that PG taking on too many licensed games for Activision left them in a tough state at the negotiation table for future offers, since they created two of their worst games through this deal — though Transformers Devastation was good. It’s also possible they took on too much, as they were working on at least three consoles games along with two mobile titles almost simultaneously. Notably, PG hasn’t completed a game since NieR: Automata nearly two years ago.

Fortunately, they do have a new title releasing soon. Astral Chain was announced on the latest Nintendo Direct, which is being published by Nintendo due for release on August 30th. Here, players will control one of two siblings who lead a segment of a special task force instructed to stop ostensibly malicious creatures who’ve come to the world through the gates from another dimension. The main gimmick here is how the main character will have an accompanying special weapon known as “Legion,” which will assist with offensive and defensive maneuvers. The game is being directed by Takahisa Taura (game designer for Automata) and supervised by Hideki Kamiya (who directed Bayonetta and several titles at Capcom), so there’s good talent attached to it.

Kamiya previously said Automata and game director Yoko Taro saved PlatinumGames on Twitter back in August 2017, and it would calm a lot of nerves if we started seeing the fruits of that soon. This should improve if Astral Chain reviews well, and when we start seeing Bayonetta 3 and Babylon’s Call.