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The GAME Group has told GamesIndustry.biz that it is currently reviewing working hours for all staff across the GAME and Gamestation businesses, with a view to better serving customers and their spending habits.
Staff were informed by letter this morning that shift patterns may change, and outlined all options for employees. The last time the company reviewed shift and sales patterns was over two years ago.
"We continually review the sales patterns across our entire store portfolio to make sure that we have the right number of people in place to serve customers throughout the day," said a statement from the company.
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Game IndustryTomonobu Itagaki Reveals New Game Outfit
It's been a nearly two years since Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden guru Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo and sued his former employer. "It's already been two years? I haven't been playing around or anything," he said in an interview printed in this week's edition of Famitsu magazine. "I've been working on new game concepts, taking photographs, building model-train layouts, all sorts of things. I just figured it was about time I got back to games, my main line of work."
The interview, the first he's given to the Japanese game press in two years, gave Itagaki the chance to talk a bit more in detail on his game plans. For the first time, we've got a name for his new outfit -- Valhalla Game Studios, where he's running the development department and handling game design. The studio is being run by Satoshi Kanematsu, Itagaki's ex-comrade at Tecmo and the guy behind franchises like Monster Hunter and Rygar.
"Valhalla is about 50 people right now," Itagaki told Famitsu. "That may expand a bit, but it's not going to be a 100-person company. 50 people working for two years can produce something better than 100 people working for one year. 100 times 1 and 50 times 2 may produce the same number, but not in creative businesses like this one. I know nobody means any harm by it, but publicly-traded companies have to prove their worth to the stock market on a year-by-year basis, and that means they can't focus all-out on quality. We're creators here; we like making things more than doing math."
For Itagaki, leaving Tecmo and joining Kanematsu at Valhalla all comes down to creative freedom. "I think success in games comes when you satisfy all three pieces of the game business," he said, "the players, the developers, and the links between them -- the retail and media people. I've been making games for nearly 20 years and I've done that maybe two or three times. It's definitely hard, but it's not impossible -- all three groups are there for the games, after all. The thing is that I think the Japanese industry has made achieving that all but impossible these days. There's an equation you can use to satisfy all three groups, but once money enters the picture, you start neglecting the things that're most important and the equation winds up unsolvable. My friends and I went independent because we were wasting our time wrangling with issues like that."
Valhalla isn't in a position to discuss its new game project yet, nor to say when it'll be revealed or what platform it'll be on (Itagaki is taking a "flexible approach" to that). One thing's for sure, though: It's not going to be another fighting game. "I already made Dead or Alive, the best fighting game in the world, in my last company," the ever-modest Itagaki commented. "Trying to compete against my own daughter wouldn't be worth the fight. Fighting games are kind of at another dead end right now, but you could say the genre would've died ages ago if DOA wasn't around. We saw ourselves as a counterbalance to the fighting-game norm back then, and without that sort of presence in the genre, it's just going to keep shrinking in size. Someone needs to step up and change things."
Valhalla's website isn't up yet, but should be available at www.valhallagamestudios.com within the next few days. Does Itagaki have any sales in target in mind for their inaugural game? "Dead or Alive 3 was the best game I made saleswise -- it did two million copies," he said. "For this game, I'd like to at least double that and get four million people to play it. You have games selling 10 million these days, after all, so I don't think throwing out the four-million figure's that outrageous."
~ 1UP
