A bunch of shareholders has advised the writer and developer of cell hit Puzzle & Dragons to “up its recreation”, laying the blame with its president.
Puzzle & Dragons was initially launched in 2012 and have become the primary ever cell recreation to gross $1 billion in evaluate, a quantity that had grown to $6 billion by the top of 2017.
Nevertheless, as noticed by Automaton, funding advisor Strategic Capital despatched a 32-page report to GungHo On-line on behalf of its shareholders, entitled ‘Proposal for GungHo On-line Leisure Inc to up its recreation’.
The report accuses GungHo of continuous to depend on the success of Puzzle & Dragons within the 13 years since its launch, and failing to construct on that with new profitable merchandise.
“Regardless of releasing round 20 video games since Puzzle & Dragons, together with titles linked to widespread IPs similar to Disney and Yo-kai Watch, they’ve all missed and the Firm has not been capable of exit their dependence on Puzzle & Dragons,” it argues.
The report estimates that GungHo has spent greater than ¥100 billion ($645 million) growing new video games apart from Puzzle & Dragons, however that these video games have earned lower than ¥10 billion ($64.5 million).
“Even in comparison with consoles which have longer growth durations, and few trials, 13 years is a very long time and can’t be defined away by saying ‘growing video games is tough’,” it argues.
It additionally claims that in comparison with Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Sony, Bandai Namco and Sq. Enix, GungHo is the one firm with a damaging investor return over 10 years, saying that when it comes to market capitalisation it’s a lot smaller than all of them.
“Why will we evaluate GungHo to recreation corporations which can be a number of magnitudes bigger?,” the report asks. “It’s due to President Morishita’s remuneration.”
The group argues that firm president and CEO Kazuki Morishita’s pay has risen drastically over the previous 10 years from ¥120 million ($775,000) to ¥340 million ($2.19 million), regardless of market capitalisation dropping 78% and working revenue dropping 69% over the identical interval.
“Evaluating President Morishita’s remuneration with the presidents of main recreation corporations, his pay is near Nintendo, one of many world’s main recreation corporations,” it argues. “During the last 10 years the quantity has by no means been lower than Capcom or Konami’s.
“By nearly any measure GungHo would normally not be in the identical league as Nintendo, apart from some purpose the quantity of remuneration for the highest administration is comparable.”
It provides: “Whereas the president of GungHo and Nintendo make related salaries, so far as income are involved, with lower than 1/tenth that of Nintendo, we’d say that GungHo shouldn’t be even enjoying the identical recreation.”
