As CEOs chase infinite growth, Hidetaka Miyazaki says FromSoftware gets "better games and better decisions" from a "conservative forecast" with "room to fail"
Jun. 21, 2024FromSoftware is playing it safe even after Elden Ring’s explosive success
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Elden Ringis, by orders of magnitude, the most successful gameFromSoftwarehas ever made, and its new Shadow of the Erdtree DLC will only compound that. But studio president and long-time Souls game director Hidetaka Miyazaki says the studio never assumes that this degree of success “will happen again with our future games,” instead choosing to play it safe and keep expectations “conservative.”
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.”
Rather than room to fail – because by every metric we’ve heard, Armored Core 6 was regarded as anything but a failure both commercially and critically – Armored Core 6 likely benefited from the “conservative outlook” Miyazaki alludes to here. It exemplifies it: FromSoftware can continue to make games that are smaller than Elden Ring but still find their own measure of success, not shackled to ever-rising expectations.
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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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