Last month, Cygames announced the opening of an all-new games label dedicated to releasing smaller, original titles. The first of these, Where the Seeds Fall, will be released next month. To promote the release, the head of the new branch of the company, called CygamesEdge, has been conducting interviews with several Japanese media outlets, telling them that part of the reason for this new initiative is that the company sees players trending away from AAA gaming and toward smaller experiences. The hope is to release these more bite-sized experiences at a faster pace of one every few months.

Cygames has experience developing games for a range of different audiences, from mobile games for more casual audiences like Umamusume: Pretty Derby to AAA console titles like Granblue Fantasy: Relink. CygamesEdge was specifically founded to create games on the scale of an indie title with smaller internal teams, according to its director, Hamada Shouichiro. While the company insists this doesn’t make it an indie developer, it’s been inspired by the success stories of indie titles surpassing the sales numbers of major AAA projects.

“Under a large-scale development framework, we often spend many years developing content a broad audience can enjoy,” Shouichiro explains to Denfaminico Gamer . However, the lack of freedom these high-budget games have to innovate or take risks provides space for smaller titles to experiment with new ideas. “In recent years it’s becoming very clear that there has been a large diversification in player expectations and patterns.

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