With Embracer laying off thousands of employees and a recent wave of high—profile multibillion-dollar acquisitions among Microsoft's closed studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, it's hard to see a game studio acquired by a new parent company that's terrible for the gaming industry, worried that it could soon be gutted by just promising an 11% profit to shareholders next year. This vile trend was on my mind when I visited Fromsoftware5 for a cover story for PC Gamer on May Elden Ring: Shadow of The Erdtree - which seems pretty independent, but the studio has its parent company, Kadokawa Corporation. 

Kadokawa is not a big one for Microsoft, but it's still big, with sales of about昨年度165,000 last year. FromSoftware is 1 of Kadokawa's main earners, but the company also makes considerable money in the manga publishing and anime markets (Delicious in Dungeon is 1 of the most recent hits).

With a game like Elden Ring that sells more than 25 million copies, you'd think fromsoftware has no interference — why mess up golden goose, but its logic hasn't saved other game studios from short-term total layoffs at mega publishers like EA, 2K and Sony ...The list continues. So I asked Hidetaka Miyazaki, president of Fromsoftware, what he could say about his business relationship with fromsoftware's parent company, and if he was in danger of the same fate that befell the Embracer-affiliated studio last year. 

"Speaking to myself and this company, I want to say that this is not what I want FromSoftware staff in a million years," Miyazaki said. "I'm sure parent company Kadokawa understands that and shares that view."

So far the software has not been immune to the wave of layoffs that have hit Western gaming companies, but it's expanding — the studio has grown significantly since launching Elden Ring and is now large enough to develop at least two games simultaneously (as shown in last year's Armored Core6). . This year, Capcom made it a point to raise employees' salaries rather than make layoffs (Japanese wages are notorious, but this is a layoff

During one of the many brutal waves of layoffs this year, fans pointed out twice that former Nintendo President Satoru Iwata took pay cuts rather than layoffs, the current game There is no movement that seems to be the ceo of the system is not eager to replicate. But when we spoke, Miyazaki himself also cited Iwata's reasoning in 2013 that the company would not fire employees even if they were in a deficit.

I think it was Mr. Iwata, the old former president of Nintendo, who said, "People who are afraid of losing their jobs are afraid of making good things.""I'm paraphrasing it, but I totally share this view," Miyazaki said.

"I think that's true. And I think the people of Kadokawa, the parent company, understand that I have this view very strongly. We can't say 100%, but at least as long as this company is my responsibility, that's something I won't let happen. So hopefully our players and our fans can take a little assurance out of it.

This is a strong statement, next to the usual CEO lines about particularly difficult decisions and pipeline rationalization.