From arcade specialist to the home console: expanding on Nintendo’s platform (1985)

A bet from a market with a ceiling to a growing one

The crux of this decision was that Konami did not abandon its arcade business, already internationally recognised, but redeployed that development strength into a fast-growing new market. Arcade machines, which sell only by the location, have limited room for revenue to grow even when they are hits. Riding on another company’s platform — Nintendo’s — can be read as a bet that traded away part of the initiative over development in exchange for the fruit of sales volumes on an entirely different order. It was a judgment that chose the growth of market size over pride as a specialist maker.

In the end this bet defined the skeleton of Konami as an IP company. The series born in the late 1980s became assets to be monetised again and again, across generations of hardware and shifts in business model, connecting all the way to today’s revenue structure centred on mobile, operated IP. The 1985 entry can be called the first turning point at which a company that had begun as a specialist maker started to change its character into an “IP-centred company” bound to no particular hardware or line of business.