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Platinum has two of its own IP in the works, eying balance between its own IP and work-for-hire projects

Platinum has two of its own IP in the works, eying balance between its own IP and work-for-hire projects

Japanese action game developer Platinum has reiterated its desire to have a balance between working on its own IP and project from other companies

Speaking to the newly-launched VideoGamesChronicle, studio head Atsushi Inaba said that there are two owned-IP titles in the works at the developer as the company seeks to have more control on its destiny.

Many of Platinum's past projects have been on IP owned by a third-party publisher, including Bayonetta, Nier Automata and Vanquish, which has limited what the studio can do with these franchises.

"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,” he said.

“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.”

That's not to say that the studio wants to only work on its own IP; Inaba says that the Japanese game developer is still looking to work on other people's franchises.

“Quite frankly, what it means is we have a lot of different choices in the way that we want to make games,” he said.

“There are still going to potentially be games in which we partner with publishers to do big things with big IPs. There might be some co-publishing options where we’re doing some of it and they’re doing some of it to make a larger game, and there might be situations where we’re going to be self-publishing larger games as well.”


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.