PlatinumGames Mulling Over the Possibility of Bayonetta 3

 

According to SteamSpy, Bayonetta has sold over one hundred and seventy thousand copies on Steam, a point that is not lost on developer PlatinumGames. As matter of fact, as you read this article, the company is undergoing serious internal talks regarding the future of the franchise, namely the possibility of a new Bayonetta game.

According to Source Gaming, producer Atsushi Inaba and many other PlatinumGames higher-ups are considering the possibility of a third game.

“I would like to make Bayonetta 3,” explained Inaba. “We’re talking within the company even now about what to do. But because we’re constantly talking about it, that actually makes it really hard to say.”

One of the the company’s biggest concerns is where to go with the next game. Both previous games essentially culminated in the titular Bayonetta battling literal gods, so where does the series go from there? According to Inaba, the third game, if it’s ever created, might follow another character:

“Maybe there would be a male Bayonetta…There’s plenty of precedent for changing protagonists, and so that is something we discuss – do we want to keep the same one, have a idfferent one, add new ones – but that’s certainly not anything I can say for sure at this point.”

While I would love to see a third game, we must consider who owns the rights to the franchise, as that will determine its potential console availability. PlatinumGames might have developed Bayonetta 1 and 2, but Sega and Nintendo published them respectively. Bayonetta 1 is available for multiple platforms — including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC — while Bayonetta 2 is, as of writing this article, a Nintendo Wii U exclusive, which makes ownership complicated at best. While some would argue that Nintendo owns the franchise since it published the second game, the Steam release of the first Bayonetta throws that claim into question because Nintendo never releases games on PC (also, the publisher is listed as SEGA on the game’s Steam page). Perhaps no one company owns the franchise, not even PlatinumGames. Maybe the company that publishes the third Bayonetta game will be the one to decide which consoles will see a release.

Regardless or copyright ownership, we here at Geek Reply wish PlatinumGames the best in its attempts to make a third Bayonetta game and to release Bayonetta 2 on Steam.