Bushiroad makes decided shift towards console games with 13 new titles in the pipeline
Bushiroad recently revealed ambitious new plans to create and expand their IPs. Notably, the company is making a significant push towards console games over mobile titles. It currently aims to develop 13 console games and two mobile games from quarter 3 (January 2025) onwards. This information was revealed in their consolidated financial results for the first quarter of their 2025 fiscal year (which runs from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025).
More specifically, Bushiroad is focusing on the horizontal development of their IPs. Aside from mobile and video games, Bushiroad has diverse business sectors including trading card games, anime, manga and novel publishing, live entertainment and sports. Recently, they changed the name of their Digital Contents Unit (i.e. games sector) to Contents Unit, with the “aim of creating and developing IP that is not restricted to digital games.” This means that we could see more multimedia franchises coming out of Bushiroad in the future.
Up until now, mobile games have been the core of Bushiroad’s IP development. However, many of their existing titles are old and suffering from increased competition. Last year, Bushiroad shut down five mobile games, and has continued this pattern this year, terminating its 6-year-old Starlight Revue mobile game in September, among others. This downsizing of its mobile games sector has enabled Bushiroad to spend more on console game R&D – between June and September 2024, it spent 300 million yen on this.
Bushiroad released their first console game Rear Sekai in November last year. However the game got off to a rough start. Since then, they have released several other multiplatform console titles, many of them based on popular anime, including Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Quest of Memories and Macross -Shooting Insight- (the English version is launching in Europe and North America on December 6). They also originally planned to release the licensed fighting game Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact in 2024, but postponed it to 2025 in order to implement rollback netcode.
