Rune Factory and Story of Seasons publisher Marvelous recently published its interim financial report for the first half of the fiscal year ending March 2026. As reported by GameBiz, the company’s core game business saw sales surge by over 98% year-on-year, but still ended up in the red, recording an operating loss of around $7 million.
Marvelous’s recent releases include Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, a new take on the franchise with a mythological Japanese setting, and Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, a modern rebuild of the 2008 farming sim. Both titles launched to positive critical reception, and have, according to Marvelous, been performing well commercially too, selling over 500 thousand units each. By contrast, their recently released mech action game Daemon X Machina Titanic Scion has been performing sluggishly, but total revenue in the PC/console game sector nearly doubled year-on-year, nevertheless.
Why the operating loss, then? The publisher also saw the cost of sales (meaning development costs) rise sharply during this period, which narrowed the profit margin to the point of Marvelous’s game sector not managing to break even. Company-wide figures show that cost of sales soared by 114.8% year-on-year during the same period. Looking forward, they hope to encourage further sales of the new Rune Factory, Story of Seasons and Deamon x Machina titles through updates and DLC.
Related article: Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma’s devs set out to rectify the series’ buggy reputation with the mindset “we’re not releasing a day-one patch”
