A former Square Enix executive has suggested that Yoko Taro, director of the smash-hit Nier series, might have a better chance of his games not being cancelled if his audience were bigger.
Some context: In a recent panel at G-CON 2025 between Drakengard and Nier Automata's Yoko Taro and Okami director Hideki Kamiya, the former said that he's not lazy, contrary to fan accusations, he's just having a difficult time getting games out the door because they keep getting binned.
"I often get told stuff like 'Why aren't you making a new sequel to NieR?' or 'Yoko Taro isn't doing anything,'" he said. "Recently, a lot of projects I was involved in got discontinued midway through development."
Reacting to a Kotaku article about the story, Square Enix's former director of business, Jacob Navok, said, "We would love to make more Yoko Taro games, but the audience size isn't big enough for the costs." Again, that's the Yoko Taro who made Nier Automata - the Nier Automata that's sold over 9 million copies and led to 2B being merchandised like she's one of Hello Kitty's (and) friends.
"I'm not trolling," Navok said in a follow-up tweet. "Square Enix is in the business of making profitable games. If they thought the game would make money, they would publish it. The article cited is about cancelled games; note that we aren't discussing Nier specifically in the Kotaku article."
Ignoring Nier is a little hard in this context, though, because A) Taro himself mentions the series and B) he hasn't actually released many non-Nier projects since Automata. In fact, deck-building RPG Voice of Cards and mobile gacha 404 Game Re:set have been his only post-Automata releases, and I'm guessing neither cost a ton to make.
There's also the fact that Nier wasn't really RPG royalty before Automata turned it into a household name - sometimes developers just need time to build a foundation, gather a fanbase, and refine their skills before bringing in the big bucks.
Nier creator Yoko Taro says "I don't really have any regrets" about his work, but "never felt like I carried out anything completely."
