say what you want about L5 milking a franchise... we can't deny their ability to build one.
Even with their dud series, I think they've shown the strongest ability to launch new IPs in Japan of any publisher in at least the past five years if not the past ten. Hino may not always make the best moves, but he's in no way a content businessman willing to let himself flow away with the tide.
We honestly could use a lot more companies with that level of drive. There were a lot of people who laughed when Inafune said that Capcom shouldn't stop pushing until Monster Hunter overtook Dragon Quest shortly after either MHP2 or 2G. Level 5 taking on Pokemon seemed like a huge hill to climb. Now look where they both are.
If more Japanese publishers behaved this way, we might see a growing dedicated industry again. Major series drive excitement. The year Battlefield decided to truly take on CoD the two games combined shipped around 37+ million copies LTD.
This is also why I don't fault anyone trying to storm the top of the mobile charts. It's a very difficult task, but at least it shows strong ambition.
Some of them have even had success in the West this way. While they had ridiculously high expectations, of all the games to chase Uncharted, Tomb Raider is actually the only one that approached and even quite possibly outsold it. It took quite a while but it even got past the 5-6 million range they originally forecast.
From Software also now has one of the world's biggest Japanese RPG series since they went out and found a publisher like Namco who would actually push it hard worldwide and the company that left Demon's Souls to rot on the vine now scurried back to publish their new IP.
The downside of course is that you can fail, but these publishers are still well capitalized, and a single success makes up for a lot of failures. The alternative of slow decay and increasing irrelevance that a lot of big publishers went through is definitely not preferable in my opinion.
. Level 5 did good in terms of stock this time.
