In a recent interview with 4Gamer, Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino has reflected on how dramatically the game industry has changed in the past decade, pointing to a time when the studio was releasing major titles almost every year across its hit franchises. Talking to the outlet, Hino discussed the company’s past, and the pressures of modern game development.
“There was a time when we were releasing new titles almost every year. Not just Inazuma Eleven, but also Yo-kai Watch. It was a dream-like period, or perhaps a hellish one (laughs),” Hino said, noting how rising expectations for game quality and production standards have significantly affected dev cycles.
“Over time, the way games are made and the level of quality required have changed, and before we knew it, we had ended up with the kind of slower pace we have now.”
“We’ve entered an era where games aren’t accepted as commercial products unless their quality is high enough. I think every developer is finding this difficult,” Hino explained. He also believes that, moving forward, the studio will need to find ways to shorten development periods more efficiently.
Level-5 is not a stranger to prolonged development cycles and continuous delays, and one big example of this is how it handled the production of its latest major title, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road. Originally announced in 2016 with an initial release window of 2018, the game’s development cycle suffered a series of delays and even a reboot under a different name before finally launching in August 2025. Other major Level-5 properties like Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time faced similar recurring pushbacks.
At least, the wait for Victory Road paid off, with the game selling 800,000 copies globally right out of the gate. Now, Level-5 is looking to solidify the franchise’s revival (something Hino wanted to do properly for a long time) without forcing fans to wait another decade.
Hino considers the mobile title Inazuma Eleven Cross a necessary part of that revival plan, and explains releasing the game in 2026
was strategically important because football excitement peaks every four years (an apparent reference to the World Cup cycle). Apparently, the studio is planning to roll out version updates every 1-3 months, while adding regular features and major updates once every six months to establish a solid service in Japan before expanding overseas. Hino also mentioned that that this is not the end of the revival plan for the year.
“Of course, we have no intention of ending things with just Victory Road and Inazuma Eleven Cross. I think we’ll be able to make another major announcement related to Inazuma Eleven within a year.”
Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road sequel is in the works, Level-5 President Akihiro Hino confirms
I think that the high demands from players only apply with the highest priced stuff. If it’s $60 and especially above, people expect a lot of content of high quality, which necessitates a much higher dev time. But as the price goes down the player requirements go down both in terms of how long it needs to last them, and the degree of quality. At least as long as the quality never dips below the minimum of playable+vibes.
Why do comments like this always come from Japanese developers??? Do they have no confidence to fight anymore??? It only shows their weakness.Always complaining anything, making excuse of everything, while doing nothing. I have never found any single Western or Chinese developers complain a thing. They are too busy to make great games to their customers. If all of Japanese developers can do are just complaining, better they need to stop their career forever. We dont want to hear any pollution of pesimism anymore
I am calling complete BS on this guy’s thesis. Unless you’re taking about Ubisoft or these other AAA publishers who rush literally uniformed games to market on purpose, the actual quality of games is largely the same. The market has matured for certain, but there have always been good games and bad games, and the only thing that’s gotten better is the polygon count.
Modern development cycles are the consequence of games being BIGGER than ever, not better. More textures, higher detail, bigger levels, etc. Small games are still great without all of that, and the market keeps pricing my point every time a new indie darling comes along. There is more than one route to making a good/successful game.
I mean… you guys are all using ue5 (for better or worse) which means you dont have to train new devs on your in house engine, marketplace assets so you don’t have to make numerous meshes and assets, texture creation utilities so you don’t have to hand paint every texture, and now you have access to some of the most advanced AI that has ever existed to help with boilerplate cpp and you’re saying a AAA company can’t finish a game in a year like they used to be able to do without all those things? maybe the issue isn’t the market demands…
but also, why doesn’t anyone take a page from GTA vice city/san andreas, splinter cell blacklist, fallout new vegas, or saints row 4? make a game in which may be light on features but has a really good gameplay loop, then in the sequels use what you already have instead of starting over and just expand upon it. keep the same textures, models, engine, physics, code, etc and just give it a new story and a bunch more stuff to do in the game, a co-op mode, etc. most gamers won’t care if the graphics are a bit dated so long as the gameplay is dope.
Level-5 is the last dev to be talking about this, honestly. Their higher up has shot themselves in the foot with AI generation (and likely vibe-coding), and has made their development cycles objectively harder and more bloated than they would’ve been prior.
The excuse that games take longer to make because “we, the consumer” demand higher quality is bs… If that was the case indie games wouldn’t be in the spot that they are.
No, what we ask for is a quality game, the graphics don’t have to be the best, pick a style and stick with it. The industry itself made this huge drive forward for higher and higher fidelity at the cost of all else, and the current market is one of their own making
Bs. Sales figures completely rebuke the claims. If you want to charge $70 while stating you should be charging more, then your game better live up to that price. Look at the last 2 GotY winners. BG3 was $60 in the $70 era and Expedition 33 was $50 while everyone was saying $70 wasn’t enough, already. Look at the games that are moving units on platforms like Steam. It’s rare that it’s a AAA game these days. Instead, it’s AA or Indy games that are $20 or less.
A game doesn’t have to look like real life to look good. We got that Kena game like 7 years ago now that looked like a Pixar game and still looks great. Persona 5 still looks great and has some of the darkest themes in any game, ffs the first one is a teacher SA’ing students. Schedule 1 looks like an acid trip, yet was one of the biggest games last year.
The Crysis games were a meme bc of how good they looked and how demanding they were, but no one was talking about how good of a game it was. Cyberpunk might still be the best looking game around, but its launch was a complete disaster. At this point, the more work a dev puts into the game, the worse the game is going to be. Especially since most games never fully get fixed. We can’t even trust that a game will be playable 2yrs after launch.
I think this revolves back ambition, scale, hardware, and technological advancements of what is possible at the time. Sometimes creators, companies have high ambitions which can be excellent such as Versus XIII, or even what MGS5 was trying to be but was slightly rushed out the door, but for every limitation in hardware, it means that developers have to be extremely creative to work around it, causing multiple years of delays, and polish such as Inazuma Eleven.
But I will also agree with the other comments in stating that sometimes bigger is not always better, sometimes having larger maps, or more highly detailed textures, and a million characters is not as important as compactness of the Gameplay Density and Game Design itself. In fact I would argue focusing on that, releasing the game, and then adding DLC as Expansion Packs would be a better and more healthier move overall. The only time this should ever be attempted is when Technology is available to do it, and hardware alongside software is advanced enough to handle it. Right now the industries ambitions are beyond hardware and software causing long delays and massive bottlenecks.
Hopefully the next generation of Video Games, with Agentic AI, and Software improvements on the API level with Vulkan and Unreal Engine 6 etc can try to smoothen the process out so it comes out 4 years instead of 8 or 12. Because I think there comes a point when we have hit diminishing returns in the AAA sphere where everyone would rather play Indies or AA games that can make things on a consistent schedule and get things out than wait until they are elderly to purchase a game.
Why do comments like this always come from Japanese developers??? Do they have no confidence to fight anymore??? It only shows their weakness.Always complaining anything, making excuse of everything, while doing nothing. I have never found any single Western or Chinese developers complain a thing. They are too busy to make great games to their customers. If all of Japanese developers can do are just complaining, better they need to stop their career forever. We are fed up of pollution of pesimism
As much as nobody might want to admit it, it is very true that we have entered a point where there is always this nagging needs for “MORE!” that developers need to contend with, and not just from the consumers, but from what the competition is doing as well. The irony is that the consumer side isn’t always as interested in “more,” at least not in the way it’s displayed competitively, as the devs think, but because of the rather vocal minority that really don’t know what they want, it certainly feels otherwise, especially when that group stirs the pot. It’s one of the unfortunate drawbacks of social media, one groups being loud can make things seem to be what it isn’t, especially if you get caught in the echo chamber 🤔
Level 5 hasn’t made a good game since rogue legacy. I wouldnt trust anything they say.
Copanies like Capcom and Resident Evil prove thst wrong.
Maybe you won’t have these issues if you listen to the people who are actually buying your games and not the people who actively hate you and everything you stand for and aren’t buying your games. Just a thought.
Real gamers just want a good game not prettified slop. There’s a reason why the classics are classic and still played today. A game taking 4 years and 400 people to make is no longer impressive when there are 10-year-old games that look and play better than this DEI designed, unoptimized, vapid slop companies are keen to shove out the door nowadays
Yeah the solution is obvious, open source software and lower cost of entry. Kenshi was developed by one person, released a decade ago and still draws new players with hours of logged hours. Same is true for robot, Minecraft and fortnight for similar reasons: the community will *happily* generate content, test and even develop hotfixes for interesting games that don’t get in the way of Mod creators. At 0 compensation modders keep games alive years after their release. I know several people personally, including myself who have bought AAA titles JUST for the molded gameplay alone (specifically Starfield and the genesis modpack). Games that offer an even more streamlined process to modding like steam workshop are also a much less enticing for piracy. The good will from dropping Denuvo alone would boost sales for a release
Skill issue.
In any other industry a manufacturer on the record, blaming the consumer for having standards would be an unthinkably stupid. “We’re in an era where certain cars aren’t accepted as consumer products unless their safety quality is high enough”
Meanwhile solo development and developers hold up the sky on theor back. Let’s be completely honest here, even GTA series is held up by modders. No one seriously thinks the vanilla servers are going to be worth half a damn, what people are waiting for is the community to get their hands on it because these AAA studios don’t want to make games people enjoy, they dont even want to make games that just make a profit. They want to make games that make more profit than any and every form of entertainment ever. They want to make the Michael Jackson of video games, and are complaining about not being able to do it by end of the quarter
Maybe they should lose all the useless ads and stuff that monitors interactions. And focus on gameplay and physics. Ps2 and 3 games have better NPC interactions like fall out, red faction and far cry’s game engine…