Inti Creates talks about their move into self publishing with Azure Striker Gunvolt

A portion of a Gamasutra interview with CEO, Takuya Aizu...

GS: You've branched out into publishing, with Azure Striker Gunvolt.

Takuya Aizu: We've been developing games for a long time -- like the Mega Man titles, and things like that. Fans have always seemed to appreciate that sort of thing.

As a matter of why we weren't a publisher -- it's very difficult. It's difficult to go from being a developer, only, to publishing a game. Inafune-san and I work really closely, and seeing him start his own company and successfully publish games, we thought, "We can do this too."

When we decided do this, we received a lot of support and feedback from fans. We definitely felt like we could do this, and we're looking forward to doing this -- and our next games, too.

GS: Were you planning this, or were you kind of forced into this, by the way the market has changed?

TA: Game sales in Japan are not doing as well recently has they have in the past. And the game development world has gone so global. You can't just sell in Japan anymore. We, as a company, want to sell our games around the world. We thought, "Let's do this."

We would be perfectly okay with being a game that just develops games. That's fine. As we get new technology and a bunch of different programmers coming in from all sectors of the game industry, deciding to publish a game just works. It comes together.