Atsushi Inaba on Platinum Games: “You run the company like you’re in danger of starving”

[IncarnatedDemon]

Development studios need to stay lean to survive and not succumb to bloat, argues Atsushi Inaba. Speaking to us for an in-depth profile on Platinum Games in our new issue, E246, the studio producer has expressed his fears that the team could grow too large, endangering the quirky, creative atmosphere that has produced the likes of Vanquish and Bayonetta.
“I don’t know if it’s right to say we’re lean per se,” he tells us. “But I do think an important thing for an independent developer like us is to be on the edge of starving. I mean, you run the company like you’re in danger of starving the whole time, and that’s the right way to do it.”

For Inaba, a creeping sense of impersonality is a major concern. When Platinum Games started out in 2006 it had 50 staff; six years later the studio has tripled in size, hitting 200 when the contractors are counted. “There’s actually a lot of people working in the company I’ve never had a sit-down chat with, which I find odd,” he says. “One day you look around and suddenly there’s hundreds of people working on something and you’re not quite sure where they all came from.”

The Platinum directors also make a slight dig at their previous employer Capcom. The company made great hay of the fact that it had a team of 600 people working on Resident Evil 6 for periods of its development. But Hideki Kamiya is amusingly dismissive of such large projects. “I heard that there were a huge amount of people working on Devil May Cry 4, just an enormous amount of people,” he observes, dryly. “Didn’t help them, did it?”
The team also gives a rather startling insight into its management practices. President and CEO Tatsuya Minami is described by Inaba as, “explosive broad-minded and violent… a violent visionary”.
Meanwhile Metal Gear Rising: Revenegance director Kenji Sato says of working for Inuba, “The first word is ‘carrot’ the second word is ‘stick’. And there aren’t very many carrots. Mr Inaba is always making you push yourself, and right now in my position I certainly felt that. A few carrots and a lot of sticks.”
“That is the correct balance,” responds Inaba.

 

[Stylish Nero]

Interesting but no Inaba DMC4's problem wasn't staffing but lack of time or rushed development. Although one can argue that having so much workers work on a project could induce a large budget paying so much workers meaning whoever was managing their finances saw this and decided that they were going to over exceed their budget and their only options were to cut workers or cut time. Itsuno and Kobayashi most likely chose to cut time for cutting staff would potentially negatively affect the development team and the development process and it would be a bigger time consuming pain reorganizing the staff and team to make up for the cut staff which would create some impositions on the dev team as objectives among staff will feel skewered especially if guy A who was responsible for making the coding is not there and his team gets disgruntled resulting in poor coding or any other issue.

What do you think Demon? Would've DMC4 fared much better or worst (or the same as it did) if they cut staff rather than time?

 

[IncarnatedDemon]

It depends on number of people who worked on 4. If it was 150 people, then yes if they cut down staff rather time i think the game would have turned out better gameplaywise.

Plus
Maybe there is a negative correlation between developers number on a project and their work etiquette.
As the number increases, so may the "We can relax , we are part of a 600-team" attitude. While in a 100 man project they know they are less chilled and more tense.
i.e a 600 man project may not push each developer to the edge in working hard.