Last month, Cygames announced the opening of an all-new games label dedicated to releasing smaller, original titles. The first of these, Where the Seeds Fall, will be released next month. To promote the release, the head of the new branch of the company, called CygamesEdge, has been conducting interviews with several Japanese media outlets, telling them that part of the reason for this new initiative is that the company sees players trending away from AAA gaming and toward smaller experiences. The hope is to release these more bite-sized experiences at a faster pace of one every few months.
Cygames has experience developing games for a range of different audiences, from mobile games for more casual audiences like Umamusume: Pretty Derby to AAA console titles like Granblue Fantasy: Relink. CygamesEdge was specifically founded to create games on the scale of an indie title with smaller internal teams, according to its director, Hamada Shouichiro. While the company insists this doesn’t make it an indie developer, it’s been inspired by the success stories of indie titles surpassing the sales numbers of major AAA projects.
“Under a large-scale development framework, we often spend many years developing content a broad audience can enjoy,” Shouichiro explains to Denfaminico Gamer. However, the lack of freedom these high-budget games have to innovate or take risks provides space for smaller titles to experiment with new ideas. “In recent years it’s becoming very clear that there has been a large diversification in player expectations and patterns. Looking at the current market, while AAA titles do have a strong presence, indie games by small teams are also finding large global success.”
The company hopes to release “2 or 3 titles of the same scale as Where the Seeds Fall in the span of a year.” Additionally, while game development is never predictable, CygamesEdge hopes to release every game it develops within three years of starting development.
As the industry has grown, player habits have evolved, with some preferring shorter experiences or ones that eschew the pace of a mainstream blockbuster. Shouichiro specifically cites himself and other developers he’s spoken to in their 30s and 40s as seeking more brief experiences, as they simply lack the time amidst other responsibilities to complete games that are dozens of hours long. This led the team to advertise Where the Seeds Fall‘s short 3-hour playtime as a selling point. Additionally, Shouichiro notes how over half of games sold on Steam are back catalog titles rather than new releases, and with Cygames being a newer company, it lacks such a back catalog, something that CygamesEdge, in time, can provide.
CygamesEdge is just the latest reflection of a shift in the games industry away from solely major projects to smaller titles that, funded by the profits from bigger hits, create a chance for lightning-in-a-bottle success stories like those seen by recent indie hits such as The Exit 8. It’s also a chance to perhaps see more unique games come to market, and that can’t be a bad thing, right?