Koei Tecmo Acquires Gust Corporation For 2.2 Billion Yen

[MOONPHASE]

Koei Tecmo Holdings announced today that it will be making Atelier series developer Gust into a subsidiary.

Koei Tecmo Holdings will be acquiring all 495 shares of Gust stock from current 100% shareholder Keiken Holdings, making the small independent publisher into a wholly owned subsidiary.

The involved parties signed a deal for the stock purchase earlier today. The transfer is planned for the middle of this month. The purchase price for the stock will be 2.2 billion yen.

While Koei Tecmo Holdings does not currently have any shares or investment in Gust, Koei Tecmo Net, a Koei Tecmo Holdings subsidiary, does serve as Japanese domestic distributor for Gust's games.

In its announcement of the acquisition, Koei Tecmo Holdings noted that Gust, in the Atelier series, has produced a popular IP with many fans. It hopes to raise the value of the IP by making use of it in a variety of fields.

http://andriasang.com/comz8b/tecmo_koei_gust/

[AranhaHunter]

This is one of the times I ask myself why SCEJ didn't move in and buy them, or other smaller JP companies....This is roughly U$30 million (unless my math is way off), I bet the other companies SCEA and SCEE bought recently (SP, MM, GG, Evolution, Zipper, etc) cost more.

Anyways, good purchase by Tecmo Koei.

[Xerios]

for some reason the thread title reminds me of family guy when peter pretends to be Asian and they don't believe him so he says "I'll just take my millions of dongs elsewhere"

[MOONPHASE]

Originally Posted by AranhaHunter

This is one of the times I ask myself why SCEJ didn't move in and buy them, or other smaller JP companies....This is roughly U$30 million (unless my math is way off), I bet the other companies SCEA and SCEE bought recently (SP, MM, GG, Evolution, Zipper, etc) cost more.

Anyways, good purchase by Tecmo Koei.

Well your math is close enough. To be honest, I thought they might go to like NIS or Idea Factory since they were already on friendly terms with those companies.

Since Gust is a niche publisher, someone had to distribute their games. So Tecmo Koei has been doing that for some time now just like how Tecmo Koei and sometimes Atlus have been doing for NIS America. But I guess Atelier's popularity must have got them to be more "involved" with the series than just distributing it.

But in the end, with as many Atelier spin-off games there are, this deal apparently will help create even more spin-off Atelier games because they'll just be Social games for probably like iPhone, Android, or whatever. But there is a possibilty for this to also include like a main series Atelier title or maybe even new IPs for Gust. But as long as there isn't like a Dynasty Warriors: Atelier game.