Suda 51 blames publishers for low sales of Grasshopper titles

Killer 7, No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw may have been warmly received by critics, but commercially they were unremarkable.

The blame for this, according to Grasshopper boss Goichi Suda, lies firmly at the foot of publishers.

Grasshopper does have a very strong base,” he told Games Industry. It’s just that because we were so indie, publishers were always [treating us] differently.

Each publisher operates a different way, has different strategic ideas, so in terms of sales, what they did, was they kept creating what they thought was good. But in terms of publishing, it was a different company’s strategic choice.

So we believe that back then, when we were completely indie without a group company to be together with, we weren’t able to translate our creative directly into sales because that was the part where there was always a wall between creative and sales transition wise.”

Grasshopper was acquired by Japanese publisher GungHo back in January – a move that Suda thinks will ensure greater success for his studio’s titles in future.

Now that we’re one big group together and we’ll be publishing our own titles as Grasshopper, we believe that the creative side and the sales side will have a better connection,” he added.

So we definitely believe that it will transfer to good sales because we will be able to choose our own strategy.”