While chatting casually with his subordinates, Takayuki was also jotting down notes about the game development progress discussed in the meeting earlier.
The eventual success of The Binding of Isaac didn't really surprise Takayuki.
If he were still just a fledgling game developer, then making The Binding of Isaac would indeed have required careful deliberation.
But with the halo of the "God of Games" surrounding him, many people would skip the initial stage of discomfort and instead proactively search for the game's fun and beauty.
This allowed The Binding of Isaac to spread and exert its influence at an astonishing speed.
Success was inevitable.
Of course, even if it hadn't succeeded, Takayuki had his own contingency plan—that was to bring out some of the game content that would normally only be updated later.
The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth.
The Binding of Isaac: Repentance.
These follow-up expansions greatly enriched the game's content.
In fact, the current version of The Binding of Isaac had already been heavily modified by Takayuki.
He extracted some of the strengths that originally appeared only in the expansions and inserted them directly into the base game, making it feel very complete right from the start.
Everyone in the company now felt nothing but admiration for Takayuki.
The God of Games truly was still the God of Games.
They were also very happy to be working at such a game company—following behind the God of Games always meant witnessing miracles.
And of course, they would go on to learn even more in the future.
Over a long period of time afterward, a small number of people chose to resign from Gamestar Electronic Entertainment to start their own businesses, and all of them managed to build successful ventures of their own. Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's ability to branch out and flourish was remarkably strong.
"Alright, enough talking about The Binding of Isaac. You all still have your own work to do. I've seen your account data—several of you have been playing The Binding of Isaac nonstop lately. Especially you, Uchiyama Ei. Over the past month, you've averaged more than ten hours a day playing The Binding of Isaac. Just how much do you like this game?"
As company president, Takayuki naturally had access to every user's playtime on the Battle.net platform.
He himself was also curious about how much people liked this "complete" version of The Binding of Isaac.
The final result was that most people were completely immersed in the world of The Binding of Isaac.
Even many employees in his own company had spent a considerable amount of time playing it.
Uchiyama Ei, the head of game development, was even more extreme—over the past month, aside from his regular work hours, it seemed like his life consisted of nothing but The Binding of Isaac.
An average daily playtime of over ten hours.
Absolutely outrageous.
Uchiyama Ei scratched his head in embarrassment."Well, that's because the game you made is really fun, President. And I've also drawn some inspiration from it—ideas I think I can use in games I'll be developing later."
"Oh? Inspiration?" Takayuki raised an eyebrow. "Tell me—what kind of inspiration did you get? And which game are you planning to use it in?"
Uchiyama Ei immediately perked up."Of course, our flagship series—Resident Evil. Didn't you already plan out the overall roadmap for eight Resident Evil titles for me? In the sixth Resident Evil that I'm currently developing, I'm planning to add randomly generated dungeon elements like in The Binding of Isaac, along with sufficiently high-pressure monster assaults. I think players will really love it—especially fans of The Binding of Isaac. They'll definitely love the Resident Evil 6 I'm designing."
Takayuki looked at Uchiyama Ei with a strange expression.
There were rumors that Uchiyama Ei had somehow awakened a masochistic side of his personality.
He genuinely enjoyed being punished—and the harsher it was, the more he enjoyed it.
During the development of Sekiro, he had been one of the creative consultants.
Most of his suggestions involved increasing the difficulty of certain monsters or adding more AI complexity to elite enemies to make them harder to deal with.
In the end, he even had his own team heavily modify a top-tier difficulty version of Sekiro.
That game could be described as true hell-level difficulty. Everyone said it simply wasn't meant for humans to play.
Only Uchiyama Ei could play it with an expression of pure enjoyment, finding pleasure through constant death.
Now, seeing the satisfied look on Uchiyama Ei's face, Takayuki felt increasingly convinced that the rumors were probably true.
This guy had really awakened some terrifying inner nature.
That said, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing for Resident Evil as a series.
Resident Evil 4 was a peak.
It was the most well-balanced installment in terms of action, suspense, horror, and exploration-based puzzles.
After the modern version of Resident Evil 4 was released in this world, it received perfect scores almost immediately.
But Resident Evil 5 and 6 later leaned more toward traditional power-fantasy gameplay.
Especially the sixth installment—picking up machine guns and engaging monsters in gun-fu was simply absurd. It was completely at odds with the original terrifying atmosphere of Resident Evil.
By the fifth game, Takayuki had already deliberately pushed Uchiyama Ei to increase puzzle elements and the horror atmosphere.
As for the sixth game, he hadn't yet given any clear instructions—but Uchiyama Ei seemed to have already figured out the development direction on his own.
Honestly, this saved Takayuki a lot of trouble.
"Hmm, your idea isn't bad—adding random dungeon mechanics to Resident Evil."
Uchiyama Ei was overjoyed and quickly asked,"Then, boss, is this kind of development plan okay?"
Takayuki nodded."Yes. Develop Resident Evil 6 along those lines. If you need funding or technical support, let me know."
With Takayuki's assurance, no promise could be more powerful.
Uchiyama Ei was extremely happy and had already begun envisioning the future development direction. He could finally incorporate some of the high-difficulty mechanics he'd been planning into the game.
But then Takayuki added one more sentence:"However, I need to say this—difficulty must be kept in check. It cannot be so high that players simply can't play the game. That is absolutely unacceptable."
Uchiyama Ei was stunned. He had just finished planning some high-difficulty mechanics, and that single sentence completely shut them down.
Takayuki was genuinely worried that Uchiyama Ei might go too far during development and crank the difficulty to absurd levels. That would strip the game of its fun and turn it into nothing more than a tool to torment players.
If that happened, the game's reputation could collapse overnight.
"Hey, hey, Uchiyama Ei," his good friend Shiratori Umi, standing beside him, also chimed in."If you want to make super high-difficulty stuff, do it for yourself—but don't make the players suffer."