Platinum Games seems to confirm that it has set out on an interesting path: in a post on its blog written by its CEO, Kenichi Sato, the development team (even if by now we could almost talk about a "software house at 360 °), he returned to talk about his project of self-publish and distribute their own games independently.
According to the post, Platinum will retain the option to partner with other publishers in the future. but he will personally take care of the distribution side of some of his selected projects.
As we recall, the latest Platinum Games project, The Wonderful 101: Remastered, coming out these days, was the makeover of an old studio glory fully funded through crowdfunding on Kickstarter. The campaign proved to be a success, so much so that it sparked Sato's enthusiasm and, apparently, led the company to today's announcement.
If in fact in February, on the occasion of the announcement of The Wonderful 101 Remastered, the founder of the Atsushi Inaba studio had spoken of the latter as an "isolated case" (here the article about it), now things seem to have changed. And to dictate the change of pace there is also another very important element.
More strategies, more action levels
Just last January the Japanese studio saw massive investments arrive from the Chinese giant Tencent, which in fact made it an atoll of its archipelago of "proprietary" production studios, ensuring the brilliant team of Sato to be able to work without the problem of distribution (we were talking about it here) and at the same time a vast autonomy of action.
Tencent certainly needs no introduction: it is a growing multinational, which every year grinds new acquisitions of licenses and studios around the world and which in fact could represent one of the main players in the publishing sector in the coming years. Only this morning did the news of his arrive of new investments in Bohemia Interactive, mother of ArmA and DayZ., confirming the expansionary strategy of the Asian holding.
A winning model?
The impression, observing the dynamics of his home, is that Platinum has two loaded pistols in his belt: on the one hand Tencent, on the other the strength of "bottom-up" production, good communication, support communities.
Could such a strategy have a future? Will Platinum Games' example be followed by others?
With all the particularities of the case (starting with the "reassuring" presence of Tencent), that of PG could be an interesting case of double-track, and there are many possibilities that it can teach.
A dynamic of canonical production and publishing dictates that the software houses follow the commercial strategy also dictated by the value of the product, in agreement with the publisher, bringing down the financial risks of "wrong" trades. The existence of self-production to be kept as "secondary" but viva would allow the studies not so much to have greater creative freedom in some segments of its activity, but above all to attempt more risky experiments, especially at the market level.
Of course, even if we talk about crowdfunding there are some logics and dynamics to keep in mind, first of all the need to identify the projects that can really be successful and feed them to the public, creating production processes only apparently leaner or simpler. This is why, if we ever imagined adopting such a strategy, this could only have been adopted by an actor listed as Platinum Games.
What do you think of his strategy? Do you think we will see more and more stories of this kind in the future?
