FromSoftware

• 1. Introduction

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  FromSoftware, Inc. began life not in the world of dragons and darkness, but in the far more prosaic territory of business software. Naotoshi Zin founded the Tokyo company on the 1st of November 1986, with no particular ambition to shape the future of gaming. For nearly a decade, the company built software for offices. Then, in 1994, everything changed with a single PlayStation game called King's Field. It sold well enough in Japan to convince the company to abandon its original mission entirely and chase games full time. That pivot, from spreadsheets to swords, would eventually produce some of the most discussed and debated games ever made. How does a business software developer become the studio behind Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring? And what does it mean that a single person, Hidetaka Miyazaki, sits at the creative center of nearly all of it?

• 2. The First Decade

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  King's Field never left Japan in its original form. The 1994 PlayStation release sold well domestically, but FromSoftware held it back from Western markets. A year later, King's Field II arrived, and that one did make the journey, reaching both North America and Europe by 1996. The same year saw King's Field III, and then the company began pushing into adjacent territory: Echo Night, a horror game, and Shadow Tower, a role-playing game released in 1998. These were experiments in tone and genre, a studio testing the edges of what it could make. The most consequential experiment came in 1997, when FromSoftware released Armored Core for the PlayStation, published internationally by Sony Computer Entertainment. It launched a mecha combat series that would run for decades and serve as the company's commercial backbone long before the Soulslike era anyone talks about today.

• 3. A Studio Searching

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  The arrival of the PlayStation 2 in 2000 brought Eternal Ring and Evergrace from FromSoftware, both role-playing games. That same year, the studio released something unusual: Sword of Moonlight, a Windows SDK that let players build their own King's Field games. It was a glimpse of a company comfortable with experimentation. In 2003, FromSoftware published Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven, a stealth game blending action and adventure, and a year later purchased the rights to the Tenchu series, excluding the first two games, from Activision. The 2000s catalogue is genuinely eclectic: Lost Kingdoms for the GameCube, Otogi: Myth of Demons and Metal Wolf Chaos exclusive to the Xbox, Chromehounds for the Xbox 360, and a line of licensed anime games under the Another Century's Episode banner starting in 2005. That same year, the company ran what it called the video game industry's first student internship built around a game creation kit named Adventure Player, designed for the PlayStation Portable.

• 4. Miyazaki and the Soul of a Studio

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  Demon's Souls arrived in 2009 for the PlayStation 3, and it announced something new. FromSoftware had found a register that was entirely its own: punishing difficulty paired with environmental storytelling, where the world communicated its history through architecture and item descriptions rather than cutscenes. Dark Souls followed in 2011, published internationally by Namco Bandai Games, and it carried enough impact to generate a new word: Soulsborne, later expanded to Soulslike. The franchise that followed includes Dark Souls II in 2014, Bloodborne in 2015, Dark Souls III in 2016, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019, and Elden Ring in 2022. Critics and players have repeatedly named these games among the greatest ever made, and several have won major industry awards. The person at the center of all of it is Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed and designed most of this catalogue. In May 2014, following Kadokawa Corporation's announcement that it intended to acquire the company, Miyazaki was promoted to company president and later given the title of representative director. Naotoshi Zin, the founder who had made spreadsheet software in 1986, stepped back into an advisory role.

• 5. Ownership and Workforce

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  Kadokawa Corporation holds 70% of FromSoftware. In August 2022, two additional shareholders acquired stakes: Sixjoy Hong Kong, a subsidiary of Tencent, took 16.25%, and Sony Interactive Entertainment took 14.09%. Those three ownership blocs now define the company's corporate structure. Inside the studio, a different picture emerged in November 2022, when a report by GamesIndustry.biz stated that FromSoftware was paying its 423 employees at sub-standard rates. The company did not dispute the report. In October 2024, FromSoftware announced a salary increase of approximately 12% for its staff. For a studio whose games generate the profile and commercial scale that Elden Ring did in 2022, the gap between output and compensation had been conspicuous. The Fukuoka studio, established in January 2016 to handle computer-generated imagery assets, expanded the company's physical footprint beyond Tokyo.

• 6. Publishing and What Comes Next

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  In Japan, FromSoftware typically releases its own games. Internationally, it has worked with a long list of partners across its history: Agetec, Sony, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Sega, Capcom, Nintendo, Koch Media, and Activision, among others. That flexibility has let the studio place its games on nearly every major platform across four decades, from the original PlayStation to the Nintendo Switch 2. In April 2025, FromSoftware announced The Duskbloods, a multiplayer-focused soulslike directed by Miyazaki himself, exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2 and published by Nintendo. It is the first major FromSoftware title designed around multiplayer as its central feature rather than as an optional layer. Elden Ring Nightreign, a multiplayer-oriented expansion of the Elden Ring world, had already released in 2025, suggesting the studio is deliberately pushing into territory its catalogue had largely left to its players.