Company history

In July 1978 Yoichi Erikawa set up Koei in Ashikaga, Tochigi — not as a game company but as a wholesaler of dyes and industrial chemicals, started to rebuild a family business that had gone bankrupt the year before. The turn came on his thirtieth birthday, in October 1980, when his wife Keiko Erikawa gave him a Sharp MZ-80C personal computer. He taught himself to program, and in October 1981 released his first title, The Battle of Kawanakajima — a Sengoku-era historical simulation at a time when imported RPGs and adventure games ruled Japan. In its first year the games outsold the dye business threefold.

By March 1983, when Nobunaga’s Ambition shipped, Erikawa had moved the company’s centre of gravity to software and walked out of the dye trade for good. Nobunaga’s Ambition (1983) and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1985) established the historical-simulation genre and, with it, a base of long-lived proprietary IP no latecomer could easily copy — the warring states and the Three Kingdoms, subjects no one else had built games around. Working under the pen name Kou Shibusawa, Erikawa turned a dye wholesaler into a debt-free games company; none of the wholesaler’s channels or customers carried over. From the same years came the other half of the company’s character — Keiko Erikawa began investing the surplus cash in equities, bringing into the firm the stock-picking she had done privately.

The eventual merger partner, Tecmo, reached games by a wholly separate road. Founded in July 1967 as Nihon Yacht Co., it lived on building maintenance and amusement machines before turning to game development — the arcade Pleiades (1981), then the Famicom’s Mighty Bomb Jack and Tehkan World Cup in 1986, the year it took the Tecmo name. Where Koei owned the niche of historical strategy, Tecmo grew in the mass genres of action and sports, building Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden and Monster Rancher across the 1990s and 2000s — a complementary catalogue. But in 2008 Tecmo hit a crisis: in May, Tomonobu Itagaki, lead producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, sued the company and its president over unpaid performance bonuses, seeking $1.4M (¥148m); Tecmo dismissed him that June, its president resigned in August, and a business already slowing was left unable to stay independent.

On 1 April 2009 Koei and Tecmo combined by share transfer into a joint holding company — Koei Tecmo Holdings (romanized at first as TECMO KOEI HOLDINGS) — both delisting as the holding company listed anew. The exchange ratio, one new share per Koei share against 0.9 per Tecmo share, marked this as a Koei-led combination of near-equals rather than a rescue. Over the next years the group folded its operating units into one: in April 2010 Koei and Tecmo merged into Koei Tecmo Games, and in December 2011 it bought Gust, maker of the Atelier JRPG series, adding a third genre to Koei’s strategy games and Tecmo’s action. In July 2014 it flipped its English branding from TECMO KOEI to KOEI TECMO across every subsidiary, title logo and overseas arm — a naming change that ratified, five years on, that Koei had led the combination on enterprise value, IP count and revenue.

The engine of the record years was a way of selling old IP many times over. Koei Tecmo Games rebuilt its revenue around recycling its long-lived franchises — Nobunaga’s Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Warriors (Musou) line, Dead or Alive, Atelier, Winning Post — across four channels: new boxed releases, downloadable content, mobile versions, and collaboration titles that fit another company’s popular IP to Warriors-style gameplay. Those collaboration titles — Hyrule Warriors (2014), Fire Emblem Warriors (2017) — were lower-risk than building a new IP from scratch: license someone else’s characters, rebuild them in the Warriors idiom, and the economics stayed predictable even after royalties. By the year ended March 2019, overseas shipments ran near two-thirds of packaged units.

The other pillar was money that had nothing to do with games. After the merger, non-operating income — the returns on the group’s large surplus cash, invested in equities and structured bonds under Keiko Erikawa — swelled until, by the year ended March 2019, investment gains of about $77.1M (¥8bn) stood against $111M (¥12bn) of operating profit, the two nearly level. Where a game maker’s single-year results normally swing 20–30% on which titles hit, Koei Tecmo instead posted record ordinary and net profit for eight years running, and a ninth to the merger’s tenth anniversary — carried by steady core profit and investment gains together.

The 2020s finally brought the company its rare thing — a big new IP. Team NINJA’s Nioh (2017) and Nioh 2 (2020), Sengoku-set action RPGs, succeeded worldwide, passing 8 million copies by 2025 and leading on to Rise of the Ronin (2024). Gust’s Atelier Ryza (2019) became a hit at home and abroad, taking the Atelier series past 5 million. With pandemic stay-home demand behind it, revenue for the year ended March 2021 jumped 41% to $549.3M (¥60bn), and Koei Tecmo went on to two more record years — the year ended March 2023 reached $558M (¥78bn) of revenue and $278.3M (¥39bn) of operating profit. Its medium-term plans set the ambition out plainly: a 10-million-unit title, and a place in the global top ten for operating profit among digital-entertainment companies.

The number that defined the company came in the year ended March 2024: non-operating income reached $235.6M (¥36bn), overtaking the $188.1M (¥29bn) of operating profit the games themselves earned. Investment gains had grown into a profit centre the equal of the core business — the fruit of a portfolio that expanded from about $1.1B (¥120bn) in 2020 to roughly $1.1B (¥160bn) in 2025, held in listed Japanese, U.S. and Hong Kong equities and structured bonds and still steered by Keiko Erikawa. Backed by an equity ratio above 90% and effectively no debt, the structure had no real peer among game companies — but it cut both ways: institutional investors complained they could no longer read the true earning power of the games through returns that swung on markets and on one person’s judgment.

The answer was to split the two apart. In February 2025 the group set up Koei Tecmo Corporate Finance, and that April carved the securities-management rights out of Koei Tecmo Games into it, with Keiko Erikawa as its president — putting the roughly ¥160 billion portfolio in a separate legal entity so the games and the investing could be judged on their own. Then, in June 2025, founder Yoichi Erikawa stepped up from president and CEO to representative chairman and Keiko Erikawa left her own chairmanship, handing the top of the company to Hisashi Koinuma — a Koei lifer who had joined in 1984, run Koei Tecmo Games from 2015 and served as holding-company vice-president from 2018. Erikawa called it a handover fifteen years in the making. Forty-seven years after a dye wholesaler taught itself to make games, the founding couple moved to governing the investment arm while a career developer took the games — completing two shifts at once: from founder rule to institutional management, and from one business into two.