Platinum Games promises to learn from their mistakes for upcoming games as a service.
Despite the great expectation generated by its announcement, since it was a new action game from the creators of Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, the truth is that Babylon’s Fall became a resounding flop for Platinum Games. Of such magnitude, that just a few weeks ago the final closure of the game was announced for the beginning of next year.
For various reasons, Babylon’s Falls failed from day one to attract players to their proposal and it is something they have learned at Platinum Games, say those responsible for the Japanese study. Despite “sorry”nor does it seem that the team has abandoned its intention to bet on games as a service for the future.
An unwanted situation
“First of all, the important thing I want to point out is that we are unable to comment on certain areas of games developed with our partners,” said Atsushi Inaba, CEO of Platinum Games, in an interview with VGC. “And that’s one of the reasons why. we don’t like our current situation which only limits us to the development of the game, to be honest with you… in terms of the concrete reasons or the process that led to this conclusion of the title, unfortunately, you will have to go ahead and ask Square Enix about the details”.
“The only thing we can comment on here in terms of the Babylon’s Fall service shutdown itself, is that this unfortunate conclusion could have been something that caused some disappointment, maybe even anger, for our fans and dedicated players. .
“And any disappointment we may have caused our fan base is something we are very sorry about, the fact that we made our fans feel like developers. provide any other feeling than enjoyment and fun in our creations to the players is something that does not make us very happy as developers.
Platinum will continue to make games as a service
Despite this setback that Babylon’s Fall entails, Inaba confirms to VGC that the team is moving forward with their initial plans within the arcade genre. games as a service. Although at the moment no specific details are known of what they are up to, they seem convinced that no longer work with a third-party publisher like Square Enixbut take care of the whole process.
“We learned a lot from this experience, and it hasn’t changed our future plans or our perspective moving forward with respect to live service games at all. Live service games are definitely something we want to do and put our effort into moving forward”, said the director.
“There are two pillars, so to speak, that we can look at internally for our development teams, which are the people within the same company. The first is just the sheer fun of the game’s core mechanics you have in the live serve game, and secondly, to perform the live serve itself.
“I believe that these two pillars are values that must be strongly connected internally and must be seen, treasured and valued. by the same people, in the same team, in the same company“Inaba adds, hinting that Platinum Games’ next game-as-a-service could be self-published. “Otherwise, if one of these is valued over the other or if they’re not connected, things don’t usually go as we would have liked. We want to focus on maintaining that connection and that balance between those two pillars going forward.”
Although Platinum has been fighting for the creative independence and publishing your own gamesas the case of sun crestInaba acknowledges that even having developed and published Babylon’s Fall themselves, he cannot guarantee that the story would have been any different.
“I think keeping this response limited to Babylon’s Fall would skew the discussion, but similarly to what I said, if you’re a developer and also the publisher, your role obviously changes. But that doesn’t mean that even if you have final control of the title, you won’t have any long term frustrationregardless of whether you are a developer or a publisher.
“If we hypothetically did everything on our own to develop the game, with full control, then if we fail, it’s more or less 100% our fault, and if we succeed, it’s basically our fault. Y we are not seeing ourselves as ‘special’ in any way if we had to go ahead and do everything ourselves”, recognizes the Japanese creative.
“But I think all this story of ‘frustration’ it is something that we must not deny in this interview, but rather admit the fact and clarify this final result, move forward and connect this experience with our efforts to move forward. This is the only way to not feel frustrated in the long run”, concludes Inaba.
Platinum Games is planning to release Bayonetta 3 at the end of this month of October as one of the most anticipated releases of the year, we’ll see if they don’t also have to go out and apologize in a few months. In the medium term, it is unknown what the Japanese studio is working on. Word is that he could be working on a new Xbox-exclusive game, but that seems unlikely after what happened with Scalebound.
Recall that Microsoft canceled the development of Scalebound and cut ties with the Japanese studio for alleged disagreements with the project director, Hideki Kamiya, and his working methods. At that time, Phil Spencer was already in charge of the line of Xbox first party games, so we will see soon if they have managed to overcome their differences or not. Platinum recently joked about its willingness to be bought by another company. Could Microsoft take over Platinum Games in the future? First they would have to wait to close the purchase of Activision Blizzard, which made things more complicated than expected.