In an Iwata Asks interview with Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, two members of PlatinumGames—Atsushi Inaba (executive director) and Tatsuya Minami (president)—discuss the company’s goals and even talk a little about their hiring preferences.
On the subject of their goals, Inaba and Minami say that PlatinumGames want to be a developer that talks big and then delivers on its promises. To help achieve this goal and meet their quality standards, they prefer relationships with publishers where they are allowed to be responsible for their own products and take the necessary steps to put out high-quality games. Ideally, this arrangement would include being allowed to take as long to develop a game as necessary.
“If a large-scale company makes video games, there are all kinds of factors, like when profits need to be made and when something has to be released,” Minami says. “Then depending on the circumstances you start cutting corners somewhere and have to hurt the quality somehow. But we couldn’t stand that, so for that reason, as an independent developer, I want to make demands and be a group that makes things.”
Bayonetta is the game that helped shape PlatinumGames’ identity as a developer of quality action games, and that’s an image they wish to keep. The reason they can put out good action games, Inaba says, is because they have a team that has experience with the genre. Minami adds that 30 of the original PlatinumGames members who are still with the studio form the backbone, and are constantly passing their experience on to newer members of staff.
Since a blank slate is easier to thoroughly train in the PlatinumGames style, the company likes hiring new graduates. Every year, Platinum hires about ten new graduates and attempts to raise them into “people who will carry the gaming industry into the future”.
PlatinumGames are currently working on three known projects—Metal Gear Rising for Konami, and The Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2 for Nintendo.
