Platinum Games gives itself a ‘D’, says it needs to sell more games

The president of Platinum Games may be pleased with the quality of the studio’s output, but he’s less than happy with its sales.

"The team has been working really hard," Tatsuya Minami told Polygon. "They’ve held up their end of the bargain and done a really good job of putting out really high-quality games.

"Whether we’ve sold as well as we would have liked, or whether the company has the amount of money that everybody would love to have in the company, I think I’d probably rate it as a C or even a D.

"We obviously grew up being part of the domestic Japanese market – a lot of our staff spent time in domestic Japanese publishers, focused really on the domestic Japanese market. And now we’re trying to expand and focus more outward and think about gamers worldwide.

But when you think about what global success really means, that means we need to be selling more titles. Our games need to sell more copies.

"We have to think a lot about what resonates with consumers globally and find that secret sauce and make sure that goes into our games. I think the one thing that we want more than anything in the immediate future — and it’s something we continue to work hard on — is we definitely want people to understand that we’re making games here in Japan, but we’re making games for everybody."

Platinum has under the stewardship of Minami released six games – MadWorld, Infinite Space, Vanquish, Anarchy Reigns, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Bayonetta.

The latter is its best seller, but even its 1m+ unit sales we unable to meet internal expectations.

"Bayonetta didn’t sell what we wanted it to sell," Minami admitted. "We were hoping it was going to do a little bit better than that, though you can’t put it all on the game itself. I think there were a lot of issues with when it came out, the kind of marketing behind it.

"We’re expecting Metal Gear Rising to sell better than Bayonetta, and obviously it’s just come out. But if you look at games developed in certain Western studios, as far as sales go, they’re clearly ahead of us there, and we’re not going to be satisfied until we’re at that level."