PlatinumGames president Tatsuya Minami used to work at Capcom, like a lot of other Platinum staff members. Minami stayed with the publisher for 20 years, working on franchises such as Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and more, until his departure in 2006.
“At Capcom I was working on lots of titles, and a lot of those were just things that needed to be done for the company,” Minami explains in a Polygon interview, regarding why he left Capcom.
“And in the process of doing that, I started to feel more and more frustrated. My biggest personal motivation for leaving was I realized that if I started my own company and brought in a whole bunch of new people, we’d be able to make original and new things.”
Now that Platinum are a recognized developer, Minami is happy with his studio’s output when it comes to the quality of their games. He gives his staff members an “A” for putting out high-quality games. However, he says, the business side of things leaves much to be desired.
“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,” Minami admits. He even provides an example of a game that he feels should have sold better—Bayonetta, published by Sega.
“Bayonetta didn’t sell what we wanted it to sell,” Minami says. “We were hoping it was going to do a little bit better than that, though you can’t put it all on the game itself. I think there were a lot of issues with when it came out, the kind of marketing behind it.”
On the bright side, Minami expects Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to sell better than Bayonetta did, thanks to the strength of the Metal Gear brand and effective marketing. PlatinumGames are also working on two titles for Nintendo—The Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2, both of which Nintendo are funding.
