Betting on an original title: Puzzle & Dragons (2012)

From contract operator to original-IP company — and the cost of dependence

The heart of this decision lies less in chasing the methods that were leading the market than in concentrating development resources on a kind of fun the company itself believed in. A firm that had lost to Yahoo! Auctions in its Onsale days and scraped by on contract operation bet on a single title of its own, beholden to no outside IP — and in doing so rewrote its very character. It was with this one title that GungHo crossed over from a pure operator into a company whose weapon was its own development.

At the same time, that explosive growth created a new structure: dependence on a single title. Puzzle & Dragons’s annual revenue peaked in the year ended December 2014 and then turned to a gentle decline, and from then on GungHo would keep searching for a pillar to replace this one work — nurturing new IP, taking the Ragnarok series overseas. That the success of refusing to trail the front-runner and raising a title of its own went on to define the company’s central challenge for more than a decade mirrors the difficulty common to hit-dependent game companies.