Today Koei Tecmo announced its financial results for the first half of the fiscal year, including the period between April 2023 and September 2023.
Sales for the whole company were 39,722 million yen, up 14.3% year-on-year. Operating profit was 13,855 million yen, down 24.4% year-on-year.
Looking at the entertainment business segment, which includes games, sales were 37,210 million yen, 4,427 million more than in the same period of the previous year. Operating profit was 13,652 million yen, down 4,342 from last year’s figure.
59% of sales were in Japan, while 41% were overseas. 9.4% in North America, 3.3% in Europe, and 28.3% in Asia.
Sales of packaged console games were down 9.8% year-on-year. Sales of full-game downloads were down 5.7% year-on-year. Sales of DLC were up 12.5% year-on-year.
On the other hand, sales of mobile games were up 34% year-on-year. They were a record-high for the platform in the second quarter.
This was due to older titles performing stably and two new ones starting strongly, specifically Atelier Resleriana (which achieved 3 million downloads as of October 23) and Nobunaga’s Ambition: Shutsujin.
Fate/Samurai Remnant shipped 250,000 copies as of September 30 (but we already know that the game passed 300,000 as of October 6). Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening shipped 150,000 copies, and Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg shipped 110,000 copies.
Looking at the future, Koei Tecmo holds its aim in trying to reach an annual operating profit of 40 billion yen by fiscal year 2024. By the same timeframe, they also aim to launch a new IP for consoles that will sell 5 million copies, on top of having at least one a year that will sell 2 million copies.
The company also aims to globalize its Atelier brand, its historical simulation games, and the Warriors IP, on top of entering into growth-focused genres like location-based games and battle royale.
On top of that, Koei Tecmo wants to enhance its proprietary Katana Engine and expand business in North America and Europe, on top of China.
All of these plans are actually not new, being part of the company’s medium-term management plan spanning fiscal years 2022-24. basically, Koei Tecmo is staying the course.
Interestingly, the company judges Wild Hearts, Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and Fate/Samurai Remnant to have “received global acclaim” with their metascores at 79, 85, 81, and 83 respectively.
As a small bonus detail, one of the slides of the presentation mentions “Atelier Wrestleriana” as the tentative English name for Atelier Resleriana. The latter transliteration was used throughout the rest of the presentation. I’m not sure about you, but Wrestleriana certainly sounds painful to me.
The game is currently available for iOS and Android and will launch on Steam in January, but for now, the listing is geo-locked to Japan and can’t be visualized from Western countries unless you have a VPN.
If you’d like to compare with historical data, you can check out the results for the previous quarter announced in July.
