Falling costs and rising free-to-play: Konami had a historic year despite the failure of its flagship football game.
Konami can smile. In 2021, the company made a 103.6% increase in profit compared to the last fiscal yearwhile this year has been marked by the release of the industrial disaster eFootball 2022, a game that has just been released in v1.0 but is still not complete at the time of writing these lines, 6 months later. The passage of the game in free-to-play with its rebranding did not ultimately dig a hole in the budget of the studio.
Indeed, it is the best exercise in the history of the company. In numbers, Konami goes from 36.6 billion yen (272 M€) in operating profit to 74.4 billion (551 M€) in one year, and it even took 111% before taxes. Revenues, on the other hand, only climbed 9% to 300 billion yen (€2.2 billion). To explain this progression, the studio notably mentions its new Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel (which we tested here), already downloaded more than 30 million times.
Sharply lower costs
But although the Digital Entertainment sector remains the biggest provider, it is the Gaming & Systems segment (the casinos) which exploded by more than 50%. Pachinkos and other arcade games are finally coming back, but only represent a small part of the winnings.
The report also indicates that spending (probably especially in development) has dropped considerably this year (6 billion against 27 billion last year), which tends to comfort Konami in its decision to move towards high-value products without high production costs. We know that the company has indeed abandoned the world of AAA to focus on free-to-play and NFT.
Source: img.konami.com
