Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (Japanese: 龍が如くスタジオ, Hepburn: Ryū ga Gotoku Sutajio) is a video game developer housed within the Japanese video game company Sega as part of its Sega CS Research and Development No.

[4] It was headed by Toshihiro Nagoshi who joined Sega AM2 in 1989 and has been credited as the creator of the arcade titles Daytona USA and Virtua Striker.

[17] As Sega began developing 3D games such as Virtua Racing, he was able to apply his knowledge of film in choosing the right camera angles in three dimensional spaces, something that the other team members had no experience with.

[21] He developed SpikeOut, which he described as a "personal rebellion" as it was a character based action game where players could play for a long time with just one credit, though profits for arcade operators suffered.

In what has been called "a brief moment of remarkable creativity", in 2000, Sega restructured its arcade and console development teams into nine semi-autonomous studios headed by the company's top creators.

As part of the consolidation, the non-sports staff of Smilebit, developers of games like Jet Set Radio Future and Panzer Dragoon Orta on Xbox, were absorbed by Amusement Vision.

[28] When the idea of a game portraying the Japanese underworld came about from Nagoshi, Masayoshi Kikuchi who previously worked on the Jet Set Radio series at Smilebit, agreed to the concept.

[31] Prior to the acquisition by Sammy, Sega began the process of re-integrating its subsidiaries into the main company,[32] which was completed by October 2004.

For the first spin-off Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!, the team initially made fun of their goal of making the game for the new PlayStation 3 while also moving to a different setting.

[39] Nagoshi explains that the fast release schedule of one game per year with a massive amount of content is based on the team's desire to constantly keep delivering the fans with not just what they want, but also to surprise them.

Yakuza 0, being a prequel, made it an easy jumping-in point for new fans as well as the expertise of recently merged Atlus USA, were factors in its success.

[41][42] Producer Daisuke Sato wanted to continue to do titles that are well accepted globally, not only limited to Japan and niche consumers.

Due to this, series producer and writer Masayoshi Yokoyama would become the new studio head in place of Nagoshi who was in the position since the beginning.

[44][45] The main writer behind the stories and scenarios of most of the Like a Dragon series has been Masayoshi Yokoyama, who previously was a senior planner for Jet Set Radio and director of Ollie King.

When developing the first game, the tagline was "The maddog Yakuza and the 10 billion yen girl" and various members of the team were able to pitch a story.

Yokoyama himself doesn't read novels and has no training in script writing, and is mostly inspired by visual mediums like film and TV shows.

Nagoshi is very involved in the creation of the scripts, and advocated for the various elements found in Yakuza 3, such as the more heartwarming atmosphere with the kids at the orphanage, the return of Joji Kazama, as well as suggesting the keywords "base" and "defense" for the story.

[46] As far as endings are concerned, Nagoshi insisted that they should be uplifting which is similar to Hollywood productions, while the rest adheres to different rules than western cinema.

Before those games, Furuta was one of the writers of the well received Yakuza 0 and he was thought of Nagoshi to be the best choice to make a script that differentiates from the Like a Dragon series.

[48] Furuta did not start his game development career at Sega, but at Spike Chunsoft and worked on 428: Shibuya Scramble.

[49] One detour for the team was the game Binary Domain, which unlike the Like a Dragon series, was an attempt to make something for the worldwide audience.

[55] Nagoshi said that for the Super Monkey Ball series, he put the wheels in motion at the very beginning, but eventually, other staff continued where he left off when subsequent games got made.

Shirosaki revealed that Banana Blitz specifically was chosen for a remaster, because with the limited time and budget they had, it was the most reasonable choice.

[65] The RGG Studio logo was established in late August 2011,[73] and was first used to promote Binary Domain in Japan back in February 2012.