Platinum Games president Tetsuya Minami has lamented the lack of commercial success behind its portfolio of games.
Speaking during an interview with Polygon, Minami-san revealed that Bayonetta currently stands as the highest-selling title in the company’s history, reaching one million shipments worldwide.
However, while highly supportive of his team’s hard work, he made it clear that sales could be better and hopes to broaden the studio’s appeal.
"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,” said Minami-san.
"Now we’re trying to expand and focus more outward and think about gamers worldwide. But when you think about what global success really means, that means we need to be selling more titles. Our games need to sell more copies.”
Even Bayonetta, which as mentioned is Platinum’s most successful title to date, didn’t perform as well as the company had hoped.
Of course, it still remains to be seen how well Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance sells. The game was released in February and enjoyed solid chart performance in the U.K. at least, but it remains to be seen just how well the game performed worldwide.
“We were hoping it [Bayonetta] 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," he said.
"We’re expecting Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to sell better than Bayonetta, and obviously it’s just come out.
"But if you look at games developed in certain western studios, as far as sales go, they’re clearly ahead of us there, and we’re not going to be satisfied until we’re at that level.
"We have to think a lot about what resonates with consumers globally and find that secret sauce and make sure that goes into our games".
Pleasingly however, Minami-san confirmed that Platinum Games will develop games for the PlayStation 4.
"We’re on Sony’s list [of development partners] because if we’re going to work with third-party publishers, we’re obviously going to be making multiplatform games and that means that we will be making PS4 games.
"Obviously we can’t go into too much detail about what we’re talking about in the future, but no matter whether we’re talking with Japanese or Western third-party publishers, we’re always talking about multiplatform development with them. So you’ll see us on the PS4 eventually."