The RE Engine and the shift to digital, catalogue sales (2017)

From one-off sales to repeat sales

The move from selling a package once to selling a digital title continuously can be read as more than a mere switch of sales channel. Shifting from a business that bets on opening-week units to one that recovers a catalogue over several years was also an attempt — in a game industry where development budgets have swelled into the tens of billions of yen — to win back for management the time needed to keep producing hits. It came together only when the in-house RE Engine technology and the sales design of DLC and price strategy meshed at the same moment.

That said, how far this structure can be sustained remains an open question today. The higher the digital ratio climbs past 70% and the more the company leans on repeat sales, the sharper the recoil could be should the next new title miss the wave of a console generational change. The mi-no-take management that founder Kenzo Tsujimoto preached was a philosophy of restraint over investment and borrowing; that a decision to commit, along that same line, to the technology investment of an in-house engine now underpins today’s twelve straight years of profit growth reflects the company’s next challenge — how to reconcile technology with discipline.