Platinum president disappointed with sales
"I'd probably rate it as a C or even a D"
Platinum Games president Tatsuya Minami has addressed the company's disappointing sales in his most recent interview, and suggested that in the past marketing may have hurt key title Bayonetta.
"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," he told Polygon.
"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."
"When you think about what global success really means, that means we need to be selling more titles"
In the interview he also suggested that Bayonetta did not meet internal sales targets, and that the reasons behind that were not entirely to do with the quality of the game, but that "there were a lot of issues with when it came out, the kind of marketing behind it."
Right now the company is focused on two games for Wii U, a Bayonetta sequel and The Wonderful 101, and its logo also appeared during the PlayStation 4 announcement, although Minami did not reveal any specific plans for the console.
"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," he added.
"And there's a lot of places we need to look for that: it's not just in art, it's also in game design, it's also in music ... 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 Games was founded in August 2006 by by Shinji Mikami, Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya and as well as Bayonetta has released MadWorld, Infinite Space and Vanquish.