6 months after the Visions of Mana team was closed down the day after releasing its JRPG remake, one of its leads has started a new studio: "Management needs to protect creators"

Visions of Mana
(Image credit: Square Enix)

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase has been conducting unsparing mass layoffs for months now, brutally gutting – and, ultimately, shutting down – Visions of Mana studio Ouka 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:one day after it rel♏eased t⛎he JRPG remake. So former director Kenji Ozawa wants to make sure his newly announced is one that, in his words, valueꦰs game creators.

Ozawa, who served as Visions of Mana's co-director, survived Ouka's initial layoffs but decided to leave NetEase . N✃ow, speaking to Automaton in , Ozawa makes a point of saying "management needs to protect creators."

, is kind of a method for him to expel his frustration. He tells Automaton that he's experienced a list of issues in the industry as obnoxious and teeming as a swarm of flies; management that makes poor choices then lays off everyone who wasn't responsible, management that makes individual devs feel insecure on a psychological level.

So, to safeguard against these unfair expectations that pressure cooks the entire games 💝industry, Ozawa plans to take on full responsibility – professionally and financially – for any managerial slip-ups Sasanqua may make in the future.

"We are living in an age where everyone is wasting their time with an overabundance of entertainment," says the mission statement on , translated by DeepL. "The gaming industry is said to be expanding, but [...] 🅷both large organizations and small teams are feeling the walls between them."

"The attitude and the way of working with the whole body𝐆 should be more important than the methodologies that are only based on the head," Sasanqua says.

Marvel Rivals developer confirms layoffs to a US-based design team, but insists "we are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game."

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's writt♔en freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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