Cygames parent company reports decline in game sector after highly profitable 2024 

Cygames parent company CyberAgent announced their results for the first quarter of the 2025 financial year (October to December 2024) and unveiled their new medium-to-long-term strategy, which focuses on producing globally successful IPs (as reported by GameBiz).  

While their media and IP businesses continued to generate revenue, CyberAgent’s games sector suffered a decline in both sales and profit despite new releases performing well. Q1 game sector sales totaled 38.2 billion yen (down 15.1% year-on-year) and operating profit of 3.3 billion yen (down 4.1% year-on-year). This decline was attributed to the sluggish performance of catalogue titles. 

CyberAgent’s game developers include Cygames, Colorful Palette, QualiArts and Applibot. Last fiscal year, it saw the combined net sales and operating profit of its developers rise by 9.4% and 34.6% respectively, thanks to new releases like Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Gakuen Idolmaster and Jujutsu Kaisen Parade. 

In 2025, Cygames plan to release more than six new games. This includes localizations of titles, like the upcoming English language version of the hit Japanese mobile game Umamusume Pretty Derby. Other future releases include competitive card game sequel Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond (coming in Spring 2025). However, it will remain to be seen if Cygames can replicate the highs it achieved in the second quarter of the previous fiscal year, in which Granblue Fantasy: Relink drove profits, selling over 1 million copies in its first eleven days (source: CyberAgent FY2024 Q2 presentation). 

For 2025, CyberAgent has changed the focus of their medium-to-long-term strategy towards producing globally successful IPs. It seems that they plan to reinvest the accumulated profits from their advertising, media and IP businesses into the game sector with the aim of creating hit titles. Also, as part of their global expansion strategy, Cygames appointed new management to its branches in Taiwan and Korea in October 2024. 

CyberAgent also recently acquired Steins;Gate developer Nitroplus, whose upcoming anime, novel and game projects (like its mecha action title Dolls Nest) are set to play a core role in the conglomerate’s IP creation strategy. 

CyberAgent’s financial results for the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year were as follows:  

Net sales: 203.8 billion yen (up 5.6% year-on-year) 
Operating profit: 8.3 billion yen (up 32.1% year-on-year)  
Ordinary profit: 8.8 billion yen (up 35.9% year-on-year)  
Net profit: 5 billion yen (with a recorded loss of 472 million yen)