Yoko Taro Built a Product That Asks You to Delete It. Nine Million People Said Yes.
In 2017, a game director who wears a puppet head to interviews shipped a product that lies to you for twenty hours, then asks you to destroy everything you’ve built — for someone you’ll never meet.
NieR: Automata sold nine million copies. Its creator, Yoko Taro, still calls himself a loser.
This isn’t a story about a hit game. It’s about what happens when a product is designed to mean something completely different the longer you use it — and what PMs can learn from a man who hid from his own publisher to make it happen.
The Setup: A Franchise Nobody Wanted
The original NieR launched in 2010 to mediocre reviews and worse sales — under 200,000 copies in its first two months. By every standard metric, the IP was dead. Square Enix had no interest in a sequel.
But the game had something metrics don’t measure: a cult following that wouldn’t shut up about it. Players who found NieR talked about it like it had changed them. They wrote essays. They made fan art. They told their friends. The numbers were small, but the signal was unmistakable.
Producer Yosuke Saito saw it. He wanted to make a sequel. Square Enix said no. So Saito did what any good product champion does when the data says one thing and his gut says another — he threatened to quit. “I threatened to leave the company if I couldn’t develop NieR: Automata,” he later admitted, “and pushed through internal approvals that way.”
Square Enix relented. They expected 300,000 units sold. Globally.
The Partnership That Changed Everything
Saito and Yoko Taro knew the original NieR’s biggest weakness: the gameplay. The story was transcendent. The combat was forgettable. They needed a partner who could fix that without destroying what made NieR special.
They called PlatinumGames — the studio behind Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, arguably the best action game developers on the planet.
Here’s the thing: PlatinumGames called them first.
Takahisa Taura, who would become the game’s designer, had gone to Square Enix on his own initiative: “Please let us create a NieR sequel, because you haven’t done anything with it for a long time.” At the same time, Saito was pitching the sequel internally. Right time. Right place. Right people.
But the collaboration wasn’t smooth. Yoko Taro had to relocate from Tokyo to Osaka, where PlatinumGames was based. His freelance schedule clashed with the studio’s culture. Early friction was real. And Taro’s creative process was… unconventional. He admitted he had “no ideas for a sequel in mind.” His design approach? “I aimed for a story I’d have trouble grasping myself.”
As for managing his publisher: “For NieR: Automata, I wasn’t told to target anyone. I just made what I wanted to, and I tried to stay hidden from Square Enix as much as possible.”
He built a clay cube and kept turning it.
The Product That Lies to You
Here’s where NieR: Automata does something no other product has done as well, before or since.
When you finish the game, credits roll. You got the story. You beat the bad guys. A satisfying, if slightly anticlimactic, ending. Most players would put the controller down.
But you haven’t played NieR: Automata. You’ve played the first third.
Route A — the initial playthrough — is a deliberate misdirection. Route B replays the same events from a different character’s perspective, and roughly half of it is new content. Scenes you saw before mean something completely different now. The hacking minigame replaces the combat system. You start to realize the story you were told wasn’t the story at all.
Then Route C hits. One hundred percent new content. The actual second half of the game. Everything you understood gets demolished. Characters die. Alliances shatter. The genre shifts — from hack-and-slash to shoot-em-up to side-scroller to text adventure — sometimes within a single sequence. The game you thought you were playing was a prologue.
This isn’t a New Game Plus gimmick. It’s structural storytelling. The product was designed so that its true value is invisible on first contact and reveals itself through sustained engagement.
Ending E: The Real Product Decision
After Route C, you reach the final boss — a bullet-hell sequence that’s nearly impossible to beat alone. You die. You die again. Each time, messages from other real players scroll across the screen: words of encouragement from strangers who already finished the game.
After enough deaths, you’re offered help. Other players’ data flies in to shield you. You beat the impossible fight together — carried by people you’ll never meet.
Then the game asks you a question.
Will you sacrifice your save data to help another player?
Not in-game currency. Not a cosmetic item. Your actual save file. Forty-plus hours of progress. Every weapon upgraded. Every sidequest completed. Every secret found. Gone. Permanently. To help a stranger you’ll never know reach this same moment.
The game asks if you’re sure. Then asks again. Then shows your save files being erased in real time.
Yoko Taro designed a product whose ultimate feature is asking users to give up everything they built inside it — for someone else. And millions of players said yes.
What PMs Should Take From This
Yoko Taro isn’t a conventional success story. He’s a self-described loser who wears a mask to avoid being recognized, writes his stories backwards from the ending, and thinks the best creative process involves “continuing to fail.” But the decisions behind NieR: Automata are some of the sharpest product thinking I’ve ever seen.
Measure the signal, not just the numbers. The original NieR sold poorly. By every dashboard metric, the franchise was dead. But the qualitative signal — the intensity of engagement from those who did find it — was off the charts. Saito read that signal correctly and bet his career on it. Your smallest cohort might be your most important one. The users who write essays about your product are telling you something your analytics can’t.
Partner to fix your weakness, not to outsource your vision. Yoko Taro knew NieR’s gameplay was the problem. He didn’t hire contractors to “improve the combat.” He found the best action game studio on earth and built a genuine collaboration — one that required him to physically relocate and navigate real cultural friction. Taura later said, “You could make the headline ‘Yoko Taro Saved PlatinumGames’ and that’s definitely true.” The best partnerships are the ones where both sides are transformed.
Design for the second session, not just the first. Most products optimize for first impressions — onboarding, activation, time-to-value. NieR: Automata is deliberately anticlimactic on first completion. The real product begins after the credits roll. That’s a radical bet: trust that your users will come back, and reward them with something they couldn’t have understood the first time. Your v1 doesn’t have to show everything. Sometimes the most powerful features are the ones that only make sense after the user has lived with the product.
Ask users to sacrifice something real. Every product asks for engagement. Almost none ask for genuine sacrifice. Ending E works because it costs something — not simulated gold or fake currency, but real hours of real investment. And the sacrifice is for a stranger. That’s community building at its most radical: your users helping future users at their own expense, because the product made them care enough to do it. Most loyalty programs ask “what can we give you to stay?” Yoko Taro asked “what will you give up for someone else?” and built a deeper connection than any rewards program ever has.
Yoko Taro hid from his publisher. He wore a puppet head to press events. He designed a game that deceives you, breaks you, and then asks you to erase the evidence that you were ever there — for the sake of a stranger.
He described his creative process as endlessly reshaping a clay cube, knowing it would never be perfect, adjusting until the deadline hit.
That’s not game design. That’s product management. That’s the job.
Keep turning the cube.