Platinum Games has announced it will open a brand new studio in Tokyo, Japan, during April 2020.
The reveal is the third of the Platinum 4 announcements that were anticipated, which have also included The Wonderful 101: Remastered and Project G.G. thus far.
The Tokyo studio’s opening will represent a sudden change in the way Platinum Games has traditionally worked on video games.
The new team will develop and maintain service games, a genre that the Japanese label has never explored in the past.
“We’re looking to expand into new genres and styles of play. One of these new challenges for us is console live ops game development,” said Studio Head and Executive Vice President Atsushi Inaba in a blog post.
“These aren’t games we’d work on until they were done, and that’s all – rather, we’d continue working on them to provide new content long after release. We want to explore this ongoing development pattern in the home console space.”
While we don’t have many details on what this first service game would be, we do know that Platinum Games wants to take advantage of how this kind of titles can be developed and expanded over a longer time frame after their release.
The move has been made possible by the recent success of the studio, which includes Square Enix’s Nier Automata (the post reminds us that the game has sold more than 4 million copies to date), and investments from Chinese conglomerate Tencent.
Project G.G. is the first intellectual property wholly owned by Platinum Games and is being directed by games industry veteran Shinji Mikami.
A fourth announcement is expected to come from Platinum Games quite shortly, and that should be a game we’ve never heard of before.
