Platinum believes recent moves can improve important Nintendo relationship, help with self-publishing efforts

PlatinumGames has been through some ups and downs over the last decade, but one area of focus as of late that hasn’t steered the company wrong is its partnership with Nintendo. And, according to a new interview several executives had with VGC, this is something the company is looking to build upon as Platinum expands into newer projects. 

At the center of this plan is vice president and CBO Takao Yamane, a former general manager of Nintendo’s licensing department who spent over 27 years with the Big N in other key roles before deciding to take on a new challenge back in July.

He joined Platinum roughly six months after the company shifted around its leadership positions at the start of the year. 

With Nintendo, Yamane was largely in charge of helping third-party publishers bring their games to Nintendo hardware where he would look over 1,000 or more titles per year and break down aspects such as what markets a specific game would perform well in.

And, as Platinum looks to get more involved in self-publishing its own titles in the future, this is an expertise the company needed and why the executives pushed to bring him on.

“As PlatinumGames, up to now, we’ve only been a developer and basically, we just had a function as being a development studio,” Platinum CEO Atsushi Inaba said to VGC.

“But I think moving forward, what we want to look at is to how we can create games, communicate, sell, and publish those games to our user base. Rather than just being a developer that only creates games for clients. Creating a game and communicating to our user base and publishing the game is something new that we definitely want to take on.”

This internal movement was already underway before Yamane joined Platinum, with the company self-publishing The Wonderful 101 Remastered and Sol Cresta in what Inaba refers to as a “practice run.” 

With that practice in the books for the company as a whole, Platinum hopes Yamane can scale that operation up to an entirely different level using his expertise to “better orient the direction” of the titles being put out in a way that will let the devs still proceed with their visions while not butting heads with partners as much.

“It’s known that PlatinumGames are a studio who doesn’t listen to what they’re told [laughs]! There is that certain pride that exists within the studio: ‘we want to make what we want to make, and we want to do it the way we want to do it. Because we think it’s the right way.’” Yamane said to VGC. “And there is that tendency for them to try to push through all the barriers to make that happen. And that sense of pride and that sentiment I think is what sometimes gets Platinum into some kind of head-on collisions with our partners.”

Regardless of this new approach to developing and publishing games, Platinum is still focused on maintaining that “make what we want to make” mentality and plans to carry it into all future projects—even if they may end up underperforming. 

That approach won’t falter if a game flops or if they are putting it on a specific piece of hardware, like Bayonetta 3 being a Nintendo Switch exclusive title. It is simply something the company won’t waver on, especially as it ventures into a setting where it controls more of its own future like self-publishing. 

“I want us to be able to make what we want, I want us to have our own IPs that we can develop with care, I want us to build a bigger fanbase,” Inaba said to VGC. “It’s as simple as that, and that’s why we are venturing into self-publishing.”

You can read the full interview with Platinum’s Inaba, Yamane, and vice president Hideki Kamiyaon VGC, which includes more talk about the company’s future plans and approach to partnering with companies.