Platinum Games rose from the ashes of Capcom’s beloved Clover Studio, and the developer has gained quite the large following over the years thanks to a game catalog built on unique ideas and wild concepts. But the vast majority of those titles were produced in collaboration with larger publishers, and even though Platinum has been interested in revisiting those worlds in sequels and spinoffs, the contracts they signed have prevented them from doing so on their own.
This conundrum was on Executive Director Atsushi Inaba’s mind when he recently sat down for an interview with Video Games Chronicle. According to Inaba, Platinum Games has decided to begin self-publishing some of their future projects so they retain control over the sequel rights:
“It’s absolutely the truth that there are cases where you want to do a sequel but if you don’t own the IP, you can’t do it,” Inaba explained.
“It’s that simple, and quite frankly in the case of Bayonetta it took a lot of time and energy to get it to the point where sequels could be made. It wasn’t as simple as picking up the phone and asking, ‘hey, can we do this?’ There were a lot of pieces that needed to fall into place and a lot of negotiating that had to occur.
“That’s a pain. That’s a hassle. For us as creators, we want to get to the point where self-publishing allows us to own our IP and do what we want with it, including making sequels. So the faster we can have that freedom, the better if will be for all the creators here.”
Platinum Games is currently developing Astral Chain for Nintendo as a Switch exclusive, but Inaba confirmed that the company also plans to self-publish two unannounced games at some point in the future. The veteran developer later said that one of these titles goes beyond the typical Platinum weirdness and is “unlike anything else”:
“Right now we’re in the middle of designing something that has never been done before. I know a lot of people say that, but the game we’re working on truly is unlike anything else,” he said.
“Even for our varied history of veteran game developers, this is something that has never been designed before. So from a game design perspective, we’re very excited right now.”
Hopefully we’ll learn more about Platinum’s upcoming projects very soon.
