Platinum Games has announced that they have opened brand new studio in Tokyo, Japan. While this sounds like yet another title being developed, the purpose of this new endeavor is actually for the development of live service games for consoles. This is a far cry from the company’s standard, as they’re well known for their single player games with intense action.
For those who don’t know, Platinum’s headquarters are based in Osaka, Japan, where it has remained since the company’s inception. This is the first time the company has expanded to more than one studio, and into the country’s capital no less. According to the Executive Vice President and Studio Head Atsushi Inaba, this venture represents a new and exciting challenge for the company as a whole: “So far, the name Platinum Games has been nearly synonymous with single-player action games. But going forward, we’re looking to expand into new genres and styles of play. One of these new challenges for us is console live ops game development. These aren’t games we’d work on until they were done, and that’s all – rather, we’d continue working on them to provide new content long after release”
Along with the announcement, the company revealed that four staff members who will be working primarily at the Tokyo studio. These four are Motoi Fujita, David Scripps, Miki Sato, and Takahisa Sugiyama. Fujita has been named as the Director of the whole studio, while the others will take on managing, production, and engineering roles for the projects the company undertakes. All four have experience in the field of mobile game development, which will come in handy as mobile games have tended to lean towards live games as a service. It will be interesting to see just how Platinum plans to implement this with home consoles.
Speaking of which, Platinum has been very busy these past few weeks. This new Tokyo-based studio is just one of several projects that the company has been working on. This all started when Tencent gave them an influx of capital investment so they could self-sustain and start publishing on their own. This enabled them to begin the P4 scenario, remaster of The Wonderful 101 which is coming out this May, and a brand new IP with the working title of Project G.G. under video game veteran Hideki Kamiya. On top of that, they’re also working on Bayonetta 3 and another new title called Babylon’s Fall.