A former Square Enix executive has suggested that Yoko Taro, director of the acclaimed Nier series, faces challenges getting new games made because his audience isn’t large enough to justify the costs—excluding the big-selling Nier titles.
At a recent panel at G-CON 2025 featuring Yoko Taro (Drakengard, Nier Automata) and Hideki Kamiya (Okami), Taro addressed accusations of inactivity. He explained that he’s not lazy, but many of his projects have been canceled during development.
“I often get told stuff like ‘Why aren’t you making a new sequel to NieR?’ or ‘Yoko Taro isn’t doing anything,’” Taro said. “Recently, a lot of projects I was involved in got discontinued midway through development.”
Reacting to a Kotaku article, Square Enix’s former director of business, Jacob Navok, commented:
“We would love to make more Yoko Taro games, but the audience size isn’t big enough for the costs.”
Navok clarified in a follow-up tweet that Square Enix focuses on profitable games. If a project is likely to succeed financially, it would be published. He noted that the Kotaku article referred to canceled projects and wasn’t specifically about Nier.
Still, ignoring Nier is difficult given that Taro himself references the series, and he has released few non-Nier projects since Automata. Post-Automata, his only major releases have been the deck-building RPG Voice of Cards and the mobile gacha 404 Game Re:set, both relatively low-cost projects.
It’s worth noting that before Nier Automata, the series wasn’t widely recognized. Sometimes, developers need time to build a fanbase and refine their craft before embarking on high-budget projects.
