Platinum Games wants to publish its own new IP, staffers have pitched about 70 design documents

Platinum Games wants to release its own self-published IP, according to head of development and producer Atsushi Inaba.

The Japanese studio - which has nearly 200 employees - is apparently soliciting ideas from across the company, with staff members submitting “about 70 design documents” over the last year.

“One of the things Platinum is focused on is we’re looking into creating our own IP, creating our own game,” Inaba told GameInformer.

“Up until now, obviously we’ve worked on original IPs for a wide variety of publishers. We’ve also worked on other Hollywood IPs for other publishers as well. But we’re becoming more and more interested in the idea of self-publishing and doing our own title.”

Inaba teased back in May 2017 that Platinum was working on a new IP with a new director, but not that they were considering publishing it themselves.

Platinum Games have worked extensively with some of the biggest publishers in gaming, most recently with Square Enix on the excellent Nier: Automata, as well as Nintendo with Bayonetta 2, and Activision with Transformers: Devastation.

“Over the last year we’ve pretty much opened the company up to 'Anybody can pitch a game,' and so over the last year we’ve gotten about 70 design documents from different people. And if you’re going [to] list out the other random ideas, the scratched stuff on paper, that’s a hell of a lot more. So this year has been about us basically diluting which stuff we wanted to focus on and not focus on, and drilling down to the point where we now have two designs that we’re genuinely focused on,” Inaba said.

“We can’t put together a AAA, $10 million-plus game, because we just don’t have that sort of cash as an independent developer. However, we don’t plan to go the indies route with just a few people on a team making a game, so it’ll be somewhere in the middle, looking at probably about 20 people on the staff making the game, so that’ll still be a healthy [size].”

Most of the studio’s other staff will have split off to work on another new Platinum game, Bayonetta 3, which it announced at The Game Awards 2017 alongside ports of the first two games for Nintendo Switch. Sadly, there’s no release date for the latest instalment yet, but Bayonetta 1 and 2 will hit Switch in February 2018.