Platinum Games Wants to Self-Publish New IP, Has Accrued 70 Design Documents

Platinum Games, known for classics like Nier: Automata, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance and Bayonetta, has revealed that it wants to self publish its own IP in the future. Head of development and producer Atsushi Inaba told Game Informer that the studio has been receiving ideas from its employees, amounting to some “70 design documents” in the past year.

Inaba said that, “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.”

He also noted that Platinum had allowed for pretty much anyone to pitch their ideas for a game. The focus throughout 2017 was in sifting through all these designs and finding what to focus on. Thus far, there have been two designs that made the cut.

“Over the last year we’ve pretty much opened the company up to ‘Anybody can pitch a game,’ and so over the last year we’ve gotten about 70 design documents from different people. And if you’re going [to] list out the other random ideas, the scratched stuff on paper, that’s a hell of a lot more. So this year has been about us basically diluting which stuff we wanted to focus on and not focus on, and drilling down to the point where we now have 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. 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].”

It sounds awfully familiar to Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a so-called “double A” game with high quality visuals and story-telling but developed on a modest budget. Incidentally, Hellblade was also self-published by Ninja Theory. Could we see other developers following suit with this practice? Time will tell but for now, we’re interested to see what Platinum Games has coming next.