Atlus released their annual customer survey to see what games their players want, and on what platforms.
Sometimes, it can be really tough being a game developer. One wrong move, like make your game exclusive to a console that doesn’t sell well, and you’re out of the business. Making these sorts of make-or-break decisions on the fly can be horrifically stressful, so Atlus takes a different approach.
Rather than have secret board meetings where corporate insiders all get together to make do-or-die bets on where the industry is heading, Atlus, the developers of the popular Persona franchise, take all the guesswork out and just ask the players directly.
The annual Atlus Consumer Survey was just released, and like all previous years it asks a ton of questions on a wide range of topics, not all of them having to do with Atlus games specifically. Some of them just ask what kind of platforms you use or would like to use, such as media streaming service Netflix, game consoles like Nintendo Switch or PlayStation 4, or social media platforms like Tumblr or Facebook. It even asks more general things like when you prefer to spend your time gaming and why.
Those are all good things to know, but Atlus is a big company, and like all companies, they’re mostly concerned with making money from their games. To that end, they also ask a bunch of questions on which console you’d like to see the next sequel to either Devil Survivor / Devil Summoner, Etrian Odyssey, Digital Devil Saga, Shin Megami Tensei, or Persona.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are saying they’d love to see a sequel on the Switch, which has already got a Shin Megami Tensei game coming as announced last November.
The survey is entirely in Japanese, but the kind folks over at Personal Central were nice enough to give a translated version in case your Google Translate is broken.
This year’s survey also came with a bunch of questions regarding the visual aesthetic of Atlus games, including some unreleased concept art for the upcoming Studio Zero game code-named Project Re Fantasy. Being able to get some customer feedback on visuals before the game is even in alpha is certainly one way to make sure your dev team is on point, and it’s just one of the reasons Atlus is one of the biggest game makers out there.
