Former Konami and Capcom developer Yoshiki Okamoto, best known as the producer of Street Fighter 2, recently appeared on a Fuji TV show that documents the lives of famous people who’ve experienced losing and amassing huge amounts of wealth (source: Sponichi Annex). On the show, Okamoto was very frank about how much money he’s been making following the success of gacha hit Monster Strike, as well as how he spends it.
To provide some background, Okamoto became saddled with a debt of over $10.7 million dollars around 2011, when his independent development company Game Republic shut its doors. The company counted over 300 employees, and crashed badly due to a prolonged lack of hits, paired with the bankruptcy of a US partner company that left a huge amount of development work unpaid.
However, in 2013, Okamoto launched the mobile RPG Monster Strike with publisher Mixi, which became a breakout hit. The title became the No. 1 highest-grossing mobile game in the world, and continues to chart on app stores a decade later. As Okamoto told Fuji TV, this allowed him to go from limiting his food expenses to two dollars a day to making over $7.81 million a year at his new company Deluxe Games.
Interestingly, he also revealed that he now owns a home in Malaysia the size of about 20 tennis courts, and spends most of his income purchasing microtransactions in his own games. Apparently, Okamoto spends up to 80 million yen, or about $520,000 USD per account on the games whose development he’s involved in. The reason, he explains, is that he feels it’s necessary to understand the feelings of players who spend a lot of money in-game. By doing so, he can ensure that top spenders don’t end up disappointed with what they get. In response to commenters on X expressing wonder at his spending habits, Okamoto commented, “I’m always diligent with my work,” and “Even if there was such a thing as admin privileges, If I were to use them, it would be hard to understand players’ feelings.”
