Hidetaka Miyazaki, the Elden Ring director who says difficulty isn’t the point

Hidetaka Miyazaki

Photo: Zion Grassl / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 19, 1974 Shizuoka
Occupation	Video Game Designer
Awards	Time 100

The first thing anyone says about Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games is that they are hard, and he has spent most of his career quietly disagreeing. In his telling, difficulty is a means, never the point: it is the cost of a feeling, the sense of having beaten something that looked unbeatable, and a reason to try another weapon or another route. The studio he runs, FromSoftware, turned that idea into a genre that other developers now call Soulslike. Most imitators copied the punishment and missed the patience.

The second contradiction is newer. Miyazaki is president and representative director of FromSoftware, and he still directs its games. His next one, The Duskbloods, is a competitive online game for Nintendo‘s new console from a designer known for solitary journeys through ruined kingdoms, and it has just missed its launch year. Above the studio, its parent company has spent months fending off an activist investor that would like more of what already sells.

Miyazaki was born on September 19, 1974, and grew up in Shizuoka. As a boy he had few books of his own and borrowed from the local library, including English-language fantasy he could not fully read, letting the illustrations fill in what the words withheld. That habit of building a world from fragments runs straight into the designer. His parents kept video games out of the house until he reached university, so his first games came on paper: Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! gamebooks, Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop systems.

Nothing in his twenties pointed toward a studio. He graduated in social science from Keio University and took a job as an account manager at the American software company Oracle. Then a friend told him to play Fumito Ueda’s Ico, and he decided to make games. At 29, with no industry experience, he found few companies willing to take him. FromSoftware was one, and in 2004 he joined as a planner partway through Armored Core: Last Raven. He went on to direct Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer.

His break came from a project the company had written off. He asked to take over the fantasy role-playing game that became Demon’s Souls, reasoning that a game nobody believed in was a game nobody would interfere with. It was received badly at the Tokyo Game Show in 2009 and sold under expectations in Japan, then found its audience and publishers abroad. Its spiritual successor, Dark Souls, released in 2011, turned the experiment into a series. In May 2014 Miyazaki became president of FromSoftware, a rise that Japanese corporate culture almost never allows someone who changed careers less than ten years earlier.

Bloodborne, made with Sony for PlayStation 4 in 2015, moved the formula into a Gothic city with Lovecraftian horror underneath, and Dark Souls III followed in 2016. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice took away the customisable character and built everything around a single sword and its timing, and it won Game of the Year at The Game Awards in 2019. Elden Ring, for which he asked George R. R. Martin to write the mythology underneath the map, opened the design into an open world, won the same award in 2022 and has sold more than 25 million copies; Shadow of the Erdtree expanded it in 2024.

What ties the games together is a refusal to explain. When he leads a project, Miyazaki writes most of the story and the item text and has the final word on characters, monsters and levels. The story arrives in item descriptions and in architecture. Even the online systems began with a memory: a snowy road where strangers pushed stalled cars up a hill, and he never learned whether the last driver made it. The messages and summons in his games try to recreate that kind of anonymous help.

The standard story simplifies him twice. Fan culture reduces the work to difficulty, and because his games ship without difficulty settings, the argument over whether that is principle or barrier returns with every release; it was loudest around Sekiro. The critics’ version, Miyazaki as the medium’s great auteur, flatters him and hides a studio. Recent releases show the studio working without him in the director’s chair: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, which he started before handing it to Masaru Yamamura, and Elden Ring Nightreign, directed by Junya Ishizaki. His habit of withholding has a cost too: it has made wikis and video essayists part of how his games are understood.

The Duskbloods is where those tensions meet. Revealed at the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct in April 2025, the Switch 2 exclusive pits up to eight players, cast as the Bloodsworn, against each other online. Miyazaki has said the game does not mean FromSoftware is turning toward multiplayer-focused titles. In August 2026 Kadokawa told investors it would launch worldwide that year, and the public network test that month opened with server problems that kept many players from logging in. On October 29, FromSoftware said development was “at the final adjustment stage” and moved the launch window to 2027 to make “final adjustments to game rules and balancing.”

The corporate pressure came to a head in June 2026, before Kadokawa’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Oasis Management, one of its largest shareholders, was pushing for more sequels to proven hits. Miyazaki answered in comments to the Japanese outlet Den Faminico Gamer: “we are able to create the games we want to make without excessive interference,” he said, calling it “of utmost importance” to keep that environment. He promised fans “truly valuable games,” among them titles “yet to be announced.” At the meeting on June 24, shareholders voted down Oasis’s proposal to remove Kadokawa’s chief executive, Takeshi Natsuno.

Recognition has mostly come from his own industry. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Joystick Awards in 2018, presented by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, two of the gamebook writers he grew up reading. In 2022 he won the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award at the Japan Game Awards, and in 2023 Time named him one of its 100 most influential people, the second game developer on the list after Shigeru Miyamoto. He keeps his family out of view, beyond mentioning a son in 2019 and a daughter in 2024.

His world is also about to reach cinemas without him behind the camera: A24 has dated Alex Garland‘s live-action Elden Ring for March 3, 2028. The date that matters more for Miyazaki’s own work is the 2027 launch of The Duskbloods, his own test of whether those ideas survive when the opponent is another person rather than a boss. After that come the games he says have not been announced.

Tags: business, ceos, FromSoftware, Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki, The Duskbloods

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