Japanese game company GungHo Online Entertainment, best known as the developers of the long-running mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, has been facing quite the turbulence since the beginning of this year, with aggressive criticism and pressure from shareholders urging for CEO Kazuki Morishita’s dismissal. In a recent move, Strategic Capital, an investment fund that holds a stake of around 8.5% in GungHo, launched a special website dedicated to publicly explaining why Morishita should be fired from his position (as reported by ITmedia News).
This comes in anticipation of an upcoming extraordinary shareholders’ meeting set for September 24. As a representative of GungHo’s shareholders, Strategic Capital launched the new website, proposing a strategy to “revive GungHo from being a one-hit-wonder” (the activists believe that the company is too reliant on the success of Puzzle & Dragons). In order to achieve this, Strategic Capital emphasizes that it is necessary to dismiss Morishita as the CEO and remove him from the board of directors.
The waves of pressure from Strategic Capital started back in January this year, with the investment fund making an official proposal highlighting numerous issues and advocating for reforms to win back shareholder trust. Morishita was notably criticized for significantly increasing his own salary despite the company’s operating profit and market capitalization declining over the past 10 years. Following GungHo’s rejection of the proposal, in July 2025 Strategic Capital made another public request for the CEO’s dismissal, suggesting the company’s decade-long decline was directly incited by Morishita – citing “failure to delegate creative authority to the right people” and “lacking awareness of his responsibilities as the President and CEO” as just some of the issues on top of the already mentioned ones.
The new website launched in late August this year once again summarizes all of these alleged issues, citing GungHo’s net cash to market capitalization ratio as being 91%, the highest out of around 50 Japanese game companies. The company was also ranked as the game company with the least prospects for the future. “If Morishita was truly a talented game creator, in order to utilize his talent to its full potential, he should take a step back from managing the company and concentrate on game development, this would also be for GungHo’s sake,” Strategic Capital commented. Doubling down on the comment, the investment fund cited Yoshi-P’s statement on stepping down as a director of Final Fantasy XIV, suggesting that there should be a clear line between what a company president, a director and a creator does. Morishita shouldn’t juggle between the three roles but rather settle on being a game developer, the shareholder implies.
While GungHo’s board of directors previously rejected the shareholders’ request for Morishita’s dismissal, it is yet to be seen if the aggressive public pressure and the upcoming shareholders’ meeting will have any effect on the future of the company. On a related note, in a separate case, GungHo has already faced severe losses after one of its employees embezzled more than $2 million USD, with Morishita himself facing a 30% salary reduction penalty for the incident.
