Platinum looking to self-publish two new lower-budget games

With a wide range of critically acclaimed titles, from Bayonetta to NieR: Automata, Platinum Games is quite the popular Japanese developer with video game fans, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. With both Bayonetta 3 and a GranBlue Fantasy RPG in the works, they have quite a full plate, but that’s not all.

In a recent interview with GameInformer, head of development Atsushi Inaba reveals a few plans for the studio. When asked what they are focusing on for the future, Inaba states:

One of the things Platinum is focused on is we’re looking into creating our own IP, creating our own game. 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.

It’s true that Platinum has never self-published any IPs – Bayonetta is owned by Sega, The Wonderful 101 is Nintendo’s, while the cancelled Scalebound still lies with Microsoft. The Hollywood IPs mentioned are likely Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers, both Platinum games that were published by Activision.

This brings us to the two new IPs the studio is working on, which were pulled together from allowing anyone in the 200-strong studio to pitch a game. When asked what scale these new games will be, Inaba replied:

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. 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].

This sort of mid-range game could be something like 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a passion project from the AAA studio Ninja Theory.

We’ll just have to wait and see what these games are, but given Platinum Games’ strong link with Nintendo we could see them head to Switch. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date!

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