Today Marvelous Entertainment announced a relevant leadership change alongside its financial results for the first nine months of the fiscal year, related to the period between April and December 2024.
First of all, CEO Suminobu Sato has resigned and will leave his post effective March 31. He will remain at the company as a director and executive company. This was done to take responsibility for Marvelous’ recent poor performance.
In his place, Shinichi Terui will become the new CEO. He’s currently Director and Executive Officer on top of Head of the Games Business Unit. It’s worth mentioning that Terui-san worked at Atlus between 1998 and 2009.
A couple of executives also volunteered to receive a temporary 10% pay cut for the months of February and March 2025.
Moving on to the performance of the company, sales were 20,720 million yen, down 4.8% year-on-year. Operating profit was 1,566 million yen, up 12.6 year-on-year.
This is due to fewer core games for consoles/pc released compared to the previous year and sluggish sales for those that did get released. The company failed to achieve its targets.
Looking at the Digital Contents Business, which includes games, sales were 9,985 million yen, down 17.7% year-on-year. Operating profit was 715 million yen, which was actually better than the previous fiscal year, during which the business actually lost 300 million yen.
That being said, we learn that the profit was secured by reducing costs and not because of significant sales success. The company will soon launch the flagship title Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, but it won’t make it in time for this fiscal year, as it’ll launch on May 30, 2025, for PC and Nintendo Switch. Actually, the documents hint at the possibility that it was delayed internally.
The company also lowered its sales forecast for the current fiscal year to 27,000 million yen, below the previous guidance that expected between 29,000 and 32,000 million yen. Operating Profit was expected to be between 2,000 and 1,500 million yen, and now it’ll barely hit the lower end of that bracket, at 1,500 million yen.
What makes this string of poor results even worse is that Marvelous owns beloved IPs that have been sidelined in favor of basically becoming a farming RPG one-trick pony. It’ll be interesting to see if this will change with the leadership switch.
If you’re interested in comparing today’s results with historical data, you can check out our article about the previous quarter’s financial results, announced in October.
Other gaming companies have also already announced their financials this quarter, including Koei Tecmo, Capcom, Microsoft, and Konami.
