On January 31, the Japanese publisher Konami summed up the financial results of the last three quarters. The period for the gaming division of the company ended in a good plus. A significant merit in this is PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER, the company’s football franchise.
Of the seven projects that Konami has identified as the best-selling, three relate to PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER. We are talking about the PES CARD COLLECTION, which is one of the hundred highest-grossing games in Japan, the football simulator PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 2018 for consoles and computers, as well as its eponymous mobile version, which is in the Top 30 highest-grossing games in Japan for the last 90 days.
But football is not the only sport that Konami earns from the digital version. The commercial success of the company would not have been possible without consistently earning baseball simulators JIKKYOU PAWAFURU PUROYAKYU and PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL SPIRITS A.
Another blockbuster Konami calls a collectible card game (not a battler, but a project in the spirit of Magic: The Gathering and HearthStone) Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. In the mobile market, its downloads reached 60 million in December last year. The Steam version has more than 1 million users.
The success of these projects allowed Konami’s digital entertainment department to earn $822.5 million in the period from April to December 2017. This is 21.7% more than a year earlier at the same time. The segment’s profit amounted to $272.3 million. The annual growth in the latter case was 21.9%.
Revenue and profit of Konami’s Digital Entertainment Department
The results were so encouraging that Konami revised its forecasts for the entire fiscal year, which for it will end in March 2018.
The company is confident that by the end of four quarters it will earn more than $ 1 billion.
Today Konami’s main market is mobile. After the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in 2015, the company announced a business reorientation. However, after the success of Switch, she launched Super Bomberman R on it, and is now preparing for the start of sales of the multiplatform Metal Gear Survive. In addition to Metal Gear, the publisher owns the rights to such major console titles as Castlevania, Contra and Silent Hill.
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