Publisher Koei Tecmo is planning to expand and grow its team by hiring thousands of employees. It also plans to shift its focus to creating AAA titles.
The announcement comes after the publication of the company's earnings for the first half of the fiscal year. It was during a shareholder's Q&A briefing. This was where it shared some insights into its long-term development policy and expectations of the video game market.
Koei Tecmo's Plans
It was revealed that Koei Tecmo recently formed a new in-house AAA studio. The company also shared some of its plans to make "yearly releases of major titles" one of its priorities.
This was supposedly because the company was expecting the console and PC game market to grow moving forward.
This is believed to be caused by new hardware releases and mobile gamers transitioning to PC and console games. The latter was an observation that was made based on the success of recently released Chinese and Korean games, according to Automaton Media.
Koei Tecmo representatives also noted that the mobile game market has already matured. They added that it was unlikely that they would see significant growth in that particular market.
The company now plans to establish a development framework to allow them to "steadily produce AAA titles."
One of the plans the company has come up with is going from 2,500 to 5,000 employees in the long run. The company is looking at the major release of Dynasty Warriors: Origins as well as Fairy Tail 2 and Atelier Yumia.
A New Focus
The new announcement suggests that fans could see more Dynasty Warriors sometime in the future. The company was founded in 2009 following the merger between Koei and Tecmo. It is made up of several subsidiaries, including Omega Force, Nintendo Life said.
The latter is the one primarily responsible for the Warriors games and its spin-offs, such as Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors. Another subsidiary is Gust, which was acquired in 2014 and is the developer of the Atelier franchise.
The recent announcements are not surprising as the company previously refined a new high-quality game engine known as the Katana Engine.
This is a game engine that is so flexible that Koei Tecmo is confident that it will be able to reduce development costs while improving quality, according to Destructoid.
The situation comes when more and more companies are starting to prefer creating low-budget games that have massive commercial potential. These are done via gacha systems and microtransactions.
