Dvader said:

I found this  store that has a ton of old games. Incredible selection . I am going to get The Thing for Xbox, I have always heard what a grea horror game it is.

Atsushi Inaba on Platinum Games: “You run the company like you’re in danger of starving”



Development studios need to stay lean to survive and not succumb to bloat, argues Atsushi Inaba. Speaking to us for an in-depth profile on Platinum Games in our new issue, E246, the studio producer has expressed his fears that the team could grow too large, endangering the quirky, creative atmosphere that has produced the likes of Vanquish and Bayonetta.


“I don’t know if it’s right to say we’re lean per se,” he tells us. “But I do think an important thing for an independent developer like us is to be on the edge of starving. I mean, you run the company like you’re in danger of starving the whole time, and that’s the right way to do it.”

For Inaba, a creeping sense of impersonality is a major concern. When Platinum Games started out in 2006 it had 50 staff; six years later the studio has tripled in size, hitting 200 when the contractors are counted. “There’s actually a lot of people working in the company I’ve never had a sit-down chat with, which I find odd,” he says. “One day you look around and suddenly there’s hundreds of people working on something and you’re not quite sure where they all came from.”

The Platinum directors also make a slight dig at their previous employer Capcom. The company made great hay of the fact that it had a team of 600 people working on Resident Evil 6 for periods of its development. But Hideki Kamiya is amusingly dismissive of such large projects. “I heard that there were a huge amount of people working on Devil May Cry 4, just an enormous amount of people,” he observes, dryly. “Didn’t help them, did it?”


The team also gives a rather startling insight into its management practices. President and CEO Tatsuya Minami is described by Inaba as, “explosive broad-minded and violent… a violent visionary”.


Meanwhile Metal Gear Rising: Revenegance director Kenji Sato says of working for Inuba, “The first word is ‘carrot’ the second word is ‘stick’. And there aren’t very many carrots. Mr Inaba is always making you push yourself, and right now in my position I certainly felt that. A few carrots and a lot of sticks.”


“That is the correct balance,” responds Inaba.


The above are extracts from a ten-page feature on Platinum Games’ first five years, for which we were granted exclusive access to senior staff at the studio’s Osaka office. It’s in our latest issue, E246, which is available from newsagents and, for iPad, from Apple Newsstand now.

^ Awesome!   I'll watch it in a year when it comes out on Blu-ray.

Hmm, that reminds me. I really need to buy season 4 soon.

Dvader said:

Nicholson again!

Archangel3371 said:

It doesn't surprise me at all that the possibility of the Bioware founders left due to overwhelming negativity.

travo said:

That Nicholson gif is now a permanent fixture here at the VGPress.  Never leave us, Jack!

Archangel3371 said:

I subscribe less to the notion that developers are whiny children and moreso to the notion that the some game "fans" are the whiny children who need to grow a pair and stop acting like utter dickwads thanks to the anonymity of the internet.

If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen.

Foolz said:

If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen.

Seriously....people are going to argue and complain, whether right or wrong, no matter what you do. If you let it get to you THAT much that you say oh fuck this, I quit a fucking videogames company, that to me is just as babyish as anything.

That said, I doubt very much that's the reason they left.