Platinum: PS3 Bayonetta "our biggest failure"
Atsushi Inaba laments outsourced port, says "it's a joke" how Japanese devs are lumped together
While Platinum Games is busy finishing up work on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, director Atsushi Inaba spoke with Edge Magazine about the company's biggest disappointment to date, and had harsh words for those who would dismiss Japanese developers en masse.
As part of a feature interview, Inaba told Edge that he regretted shifting responsibility for the PlayStation 3 version of Bayonetta to an external team within Platinum publishing partner Sega. That version of the game turned out to have frame rate issues and control quirks not present in the Xbox 360 edition, which Platinum developed in-house.
"The biggest failure for Platinum so far, the one that really sticks in my mind, is that port," Inaba told the magazine. "At the time we didn't really know how to develop on PS3 all that well, and whether we could have done it… is irrelevant: we made the decision that we couldn't. But looking back on the result, and especially what ended up being released to users, I regard that as our biggest failure."
Inferior ports presumably won't be an issue for Bayonetta 2, as that game has been announced as a Wii U exclusive, with Nintendo set to publish.
According to Edge sister site CVG, Inaba also took exception in the interview to the way people talk about the Japanese game development scene.
"I don't like it when people lump Japanese games developers all together into one group," Inaba said. "Frankly, I think it's a joke. What do these people know? Think about Western developers. There are many Western developers making terrible games, and then you see one like Infinity Ward making a game that sells 20 million and everyone goes, 'Hey, Western developers are amazing!' There are tons of terrible Western developers, just like there are tons of terrible Japanese developers. To lump studios together in great masses misses the point."