Dragami Games director Yoshimi Yasuda has shared an interesting update regarding Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP.
For those who didn’t know about this, Lollipop Chainsaw was created by Grasshopper Manufacture in 2012, as a prescient collaboration between Suda51 and future DC Studios head James Gunn. This game was published by Japanese conglomerate Kadokawa, via their Kadokawa Games label.
Since that time, Grasshopper Manufacture, taking Suda51 with them, had been acquired by Gungho Online, and then their current owner after that, NetEase Games. While the studio kept many of their franchises, such as Shadows of the Damned and No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw stayed with Kadokawa.
Kadokawa Games was closed, but replaced by Kadokawa’s new game studio, Dragami Games. It’s now Dragami who is working on the Lollipop Chainsaw remake, now called Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP. And this is what you needed to know to catch up to where this game is at now.
In his latest tweet, Yasuda has said this:
“We have received many requests for a physical version of RePOP as well as a digital download version, and we are working to make it available worldwide.”
The topic of digital vs physical can be particularly thorny lately, but Yasuda’s announcement is a good one for gamers. In recent years, a few high profile games have chosen to pass on the physical release.
For Remedy, they justified skipping a physical release for Alan Wake 2 because it was prohibitively expensive for them. It’s possible that their contract with Epic Games had something to do with the decision too. But, that decision seems to have backfired on them, as their recent reports revealed that the award winning, GOTY worthy title hasn’t broken even yet.
Another frustrating choice many game companies have been making is making limited boutique physical releases. Now, this makes sense if you’re a smaller company that doesn’t have the resources to pay for bigger publication runs. But when you see someone like Ubisoft give Far Cry Blood Dragon the Limited Run Games treatment, it’s pretty clear that they can do more.
It’s long been suspected that game companies want to drop physical games completely in favor of digital, but it’s clear that there’s still a huge demand for physical media in games. If a title like Lollipop Chainsaw, which is no indie, but also not at the marquee level of something like Bayonetta, can get a global physical release, what excuse does the rest of the industry have?
