FromSoftware buys range with reach: The Duskbloods ships on one console, under Nintendo

FromSoftware's next release, The Duskbloods, is a competitive multiplayer game set in a world of vampires that will be exclusive to the Switch 2 and published by Nintendo when it launches later this year ^[1]. As The Verge puts it, that is a new genre, a new setting, a new platform and a new publisher in a single product from the studio that gave the industry the word "Soulslike" ^[2].

The stated reason for the confidence is money. Elden Ring has sold more than 30 million copies since its 2022 launch ^[3], and studio president Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed both Elden Ring and The Duskbloods, told The Verge at a hands-on event at the company's Tokyo office that the success "has definitely allowed us to explore, I wouldn't say risky ideas, but things that we might not have had the confidence for" ^[4].

The diversification is not new behaviour, only newly expensive-looking. FromSoftware's first release was the dungeon-crawling RPG King's Field in 1994 ^[5], followed by a steady stream of titles including the mech-battling Armored Core series ^[6], before Demon's Souls in 2009 established the template ^[7]. The Dark Souls trilogy and 2015's Bloodborne sold millions of copies each, but Elden Ring was the studio's first blockbuster ^[8] - a gap of 13 years between the template and the breakout ^[1]. In the six years between Dark Souls 3 in 2016 and Elden Ring in 2022 ^[2], the studio shipped two one-offs that fit no template: the VR story Deracine in 2018 and the ninja action game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019 ^[9], both directed by Miyazaki ^[10].

The Duskbloods is also less of a jump in design terms than in business terms. FromSoftware had been steadily adding multiplayer elements to largely single-player games, including summoning other players for help in Elden Ring ^[11], and accumulated a backlog of multiplayer-centric ideas that went unused ^[12]. In 2019, Miyazaki told The Verge that part of what the studio finds interesting "may deviate slightly from what is considered to have mass appeal", and that this unorthodox nature is what ties its games together ^[13].

The trade is worth naming plainly. Elden Ring's aftermath shows what the studio can now monetise on its own terms: a large-scale expansion, a co-op spinoff in Nightreign, and a film adaptation from A24 with director Alex Garland ^[14]. Against that, The Duskbloods hands publishing to Nintendo and confines the studio's most population-dependent genre to a single console ^[1]. Competitive multiplayer lives or dies on matchmaking density, and exclusivity is a constraint on the pool a game can draw from. Whatever FromSoftware gains in genre freedom, it is accepting a ceiling on audience that its biggest game did not have to accept.

Three things to watch. Whether Nintendo's publishing role is a one-off deal or the start of a standing relationship for experimental FromSoftware projects ^[1]. Whether the filed-away multiplayer ideas ^[12] become a second product line rather than one release. And whether the next mainline game reverts to the Elden Ring formula, which would suggest the diversification is a side bet funded by the template rather than a replacement for it ^[3].