Dear Reader:
Level-5 talks DS success, branding, Inazuma Eleven franchise, and future plans
The following information comes from Akihiro Hino, Level-5’s president, founder, and chief creative force…
“I was originally on the creative side of things, so I had to give a lot of thought to how we were going to sell Layton. The platform was going to be the DS from the start to keep costs down, so the question was how to appeal to that userbase. The conclusion we came up with was that Brain Age probably brought a lot of new casual users to video games, so we figured that making perhaps some sort of advanced version of Brain Age, something that audience can move on to after that game, would produce results. That became the basic strategy. Layton was developed from the start with the hope that it’d sell.
The fact we were able to successfully kick off an original series on the DS was a great confidence booster for all of us. For me personally, it made me realize how much fun it is to come up with a promotion scheme to effectively sell the games we work on. ‘Sales’ became a big watchword in my mind as a result of that experience, and that’s when I started getting involved more personally in marketing.
I see marketing as a sort of simulation game. It’s really fun to think of ways to sell a game, then seeing it be successful. I think it’s just as creative a process as game development itself. I try to keep the marketing department focused on creativity, and to do that, I have them experience as many things as possible outside of their basic work. The way I see it, even if a Level-5 staffer has only been here for a couple years, he’s got the experience of ten or so!”
Inazuma Eleven is targeted toward children, so we had to think about how to sell to that group. Children, in the end, don’t have a lot of spending money, so we had to bring the product to them in ways that didn’t cost them anything. It’s like solving a puzzle, thinking all of this through.
Anime is free on TV, and manga is cheap enough for everyone — a lot cheaper than a new game, anyway. That’s why we went with that very traditional sort of cross-media approach. A lot of times, a video game won’t sell nearly as well as the anime or manga it’s based off of, and part of the reason is that the game feels completely different from the work it’s based on. That’s something kids can pick up on right away, and so one of our main goals with Inazuma was to keep the anime and the game close together. If the anime staff comes up with a great idea, then we rewrite the game story to go along with that. We have both creative teams playing against each other during development.
To be honest, Ni no Kuni got its start purely out of a personal dream of mine to work with Studio Ghibli. The game was meant to commemorate our tenth birthday, so we deliberately said to ourselves ‘Okay, let’s not worry about selling the game and just make something really good instead.’ The project wound up ballooning in size along the way, though, as we came to know Ghibli and other people. I figured selling 50,000 copies would be good enough, but ultimately it got to the point where we had to sell half a million.
I think it’ll (upcoming Famitsu announcements) raise the impact Level-5 has on the industry. I want to show the industry that we’re here to stay, and I also want to show people in other industries what the game business is capable of.”