Elden Ring and Dark Souls developer FromSoftware‘s corporate owner has announced that it’s got a total of 26 games in development, which feels like it should be good news for Miyazaki fans.
The Elden Ring and Dark Souls studio is owned by Japanese conglomerate Kadokawa Corporation. Kadokawa owns dozens of companies, but among them are a handful of game developers and publishers, including Danganronpa dev Spike Chunsoft, the developers of RPG Maker, and visual novel publisher Ascii Media Works.
According to Kadokawa’s latest earnings report (via Gamewatch, translated via Automaton), the conglomerate has 26 games in active development – 20 for console and six for mobile. Clearly, that’s a number split across multiple companies, but we only know about a handful of them. Most notable right now is probably Action Game Maker, which developer Gotcha Gotcha Games revealed in July as a follow-up to its acclaimed RPG development tool, but that still leaves several unaccounted-for titles.
Obviously, the hope is that FromSoftware has multiple irons in the fire. Having released Armored Core 6 in between Elden Ring and its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, there’s precedent for the studio getting its new games out quicker than it might have done in the past, but there’s little sense of what a new project could be. Back in February, director Miyazaki said there were no “current plans” for more Elden Ring, but publisher Bandai Namco seems to have other ideas – after its launch in March 2022, CEO Yasuo Miyakawa said that Elden Ring was the start of an entire franchise “beyond the game itself.”
Of course, FromSoftware isn’t just the Elden Ring/Armored Core/Dark Souls studio. In recent years it’s also released Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but the game that seems to remain on everyone’s mind is Bloodborne. Despite calls for remasters, re-releases, and a PC launch, Bloodborne has been left largely unattended since it arrived on PS4 in 2014 even as most of its console brethren make the jump to PC and PS5. Surely, with 20 different projects in the works at Kadokawa, one of them has to be Bloodborne-themed. Right?
