Platinum Games calls Bayonetta on PS3 its "biggest failure"

Platinum Games - the highly acclaimed developer of such titles as Bayonetta, Vanquish and Anarchy Reigns - has called the PS3 version of Bayonetta the studio's "biggest failure."

In an interview with Edge, Platinum producer Atsushi Inaba confessed that the studio denied handling the PS3 port of Bayonetta, opting to instead pass it off to an in-house team at its publisher, Sega.

The resulting game featured washed-out colours, a choppy frame-rate, lengthy load times and control issues.

"Throughout the game the gap in performance is colossal, and pretty much unprecedented," wrote Richard Leadbetter in Digital Foundry's Bayonetta face-off in 2009.

"The biggest failure for Platinum so far, the one that really sticks in my mind, is that [Bayonetta] port," lamented Inaba. "At the time we didn't really know how to develop on PS3 all that well, and whether we could have done it… is irrelevant: we made the decision that we couldn't. But looking back on the result, and especially what ended up being released to users, I regard that as our biggest failure."

Platinum did learn from this and began developing its later titles like Vanquish, Anarchy Reigns and the upcoming Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for PS3 in-house.

"One thing I will say is that it wasn't a failure for nothing," Inaba explained. "We learned that we needed to take responsibility for everything. So on Vanquish we developed both versions in-house."

"We learned, so it wasn't a pointless failure, but it was a failure nonetheless."

Elsewhere in the interview Inaba explained that Platinum had a five project deal with Sega, which expired with the upcoming Anarchy Reigns. Moving forward, the studio has an exclusivity deal with Nintendo, hence why the upcoming The Wonderful 101 (formerly Project P-100) and Bayonetta 2 are Wii U exclusives.

Evidently Platinum was already eyeing other studios near the completion of Anarchy Reigns. One can hardly blame them when Sega pushed the game back to a hazy Q1 2013 release less than three weeks before it was supposed to debut in the west.