GamesAction RpgElden RingAs CEOs chase infinite growth, Hidetaka Miyazaki says FromSoftware gets “better games and better decisions” from a “conservative forecast” with “room to fail"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesAction RpgElden RingAs CEOs chase infinite growth, Hidetaka Miyazaki says FromSoftware gets “better games and better decisions” from a “conservative forecast” with “room to fail"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: FromSoftware / Bandai Namco)
In an interview withThe Guardian, Miyazaki outlines a financial and developmental strategy that seems almost opposed to the growth-centric pursuits of many large companies – companies much,muchlarger than FromSoftware, to be fair – including severalgame publisherswho’verecently rackedupthousands of layoffsbetween them in a nominally last-ditch effort to cut costs (which was, curiously, a ditch before cutting executive payouts).
“Elden Ring was in a league of its own in terms of the success and critical acclaim that it has seen, but what we try to do as a company is never assume that will happen again with our future games,” Miyazaki says.
“No decision is based on any assumption that, hey, we did it once, it’s going to happen again. Allowing for this rather conservative forecast gives us room to fail – and that in turn results in better games and better decisions,” he continues. “In a roundabout way, I think that assumption of not making another hit, that conservative outlook, is fueling and aiding our game design.”
(Image credit: FromSoftware)
We’ve already seen a real-world example of this in action. Between the launch of Elden Ring in 2022 and now theElden Ring DLC, FromSoftware releasedArmored Core 6 (reviewhere, if you’re wondering what we thought). It had been 11 years since Armored Core 5, and during that time, FromSoftware had cultivated a reputation almost exclusively as a master of dark fantasy RPGs. As a result, a lot more people were interested inanythingFromSoftware made, even if that was the sixth numbered game in a mech series they may not have tried (hello, it’s me).
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Earlier this month, Miyazaki affirmed that the layoffs we’ve been seeing – which, for the record, would fall under much stricter labor regulations in Japan and therefore aren’t so easily dropped on people –are “something I would not let happen” to FromSoft as long as he’s in charge, citing (and paraphrasing) late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s theory that “‘people who are afraid of losing their jobs are afraid of making good things.'”
Miyazaki says games like Elden Ring have to be hard: “If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down.”
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