As one of the gaming industry's most treasured oddities, Nier series creator and masked enigma Yoko Taro contends with the fickle patience of a fanbase that's eager to know what he's working on next. As reported by 4Gamer (via Automaton), Yoko said during a G-Con 2025 discussion panel with Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya that—while his fans might joke that he doesn't do any work—he's actually had plenty of games in production recently.
The problem is they keep getting cancelled before anyone gets to see them.
"People often ask me why I don't make a sequel to Nier, or why I'm not working, but that's because I've had so many projects that have been discontinued lately," Yoko said via machine translation. "Even though I was working, it wasn't released to the public. I'm getting paid, so it's not a problem for me personally, but because my output isn't being released to the public, people see me as not working."
While that's particularly disappointing for anyone hoping for more Yoko Taro-brand weirdness, the Nier creator is just one of many game developers who've recently had to watch their work evaporate. 2025 has continued a years-long rash of game cancellations, studio closures, and associated layoffs, with major publishers like Microsoft axing ongoing projects like a ZeniMax MMO and a Perfect Dark reboot.
And Square Enix, which has published more than a dozen games that Yoko has worked on since 2003's Drakengard, announced in 2024 that it would be investing in fewer game releases in a "shift from quantity to quality" as part of a reorganizational business plan.
To Yoko's credit, his work hasn't exactly disappeared since Nier: Automata's release in 2017. He was the creative director for the three tabletop-inspired Voice of Cards games, as well as a handful of Square Enix-published mobile games. Meanwhile, he's written a few books, worked on two TV shows, and even written multiple Nier-related stage plays. I haven't written one stage play.
During the G-Con panel, Yoko offered a silver lining about those projects of his that were cancelled: If all those games had been released, they might not all have been work he would've been content with.
"I think it's better not to release something than to release something weird, so I don't have any negative feelings about that," Yoko said.
