Games Business Report

Arc System Works is a company based in Yokohama, Japan.  They were founded in 1988 by Minoru Kidooka. Their revenue is 680 Million Japanese Yen, which translates to 5,984,000 US dollars.  In 2017, the company had 121 employees.  The company that publishes and localizes their games is Aksys Games located in California.  The company started in 1988 as Arc Co., Ltd.  It spent its early years as a contract developer for Sega, Sammy and Banpresto.  The game series that they are the best known for is Guilty Gear.  The first game was released in 1998 and was their first big break out game that cemented the kinds of games the company would make.  Their biggest works within the last five years were Blazblue Chronophantasma, Guilty Gear Xrd, Under Night In-Birth, Blazblue Centralfiction, Dragonball FighterZ, and Blazblue Cross Tag Battle.  The only other company they’ve started/acquired is Arc System Works America, Inc., which is their North American Branch.  When they hire folks, they expect the folks to know how their games work, have a good idea of how to make the systems their games use, and be able to draw the characters from their series, as well as have any drawing skills.  In addition, they have to know how to create sprite based and 3-D cel-shaded graphics and animations.  Their biggest competitors are Atlus, French Bread, and probably their largest competitor is Capcom as Guilty Gear has been compared to Street Fighter and their two biggest games of this year are often compared to one of Capcom’s biggest series: Marvel vs. Capcom, and one of those games is considered even better than the most recent Marvel vs. Capcom Game.  Their audience is quite niche.  Their audience is for people who enjoy fighting games that are challenging to play, in fact, games like Guilty Gear are considered one of the more complex fighting games to play and have a lot of systems to memorize.  The other audience they definitely appeal to are those who enjoy anime fighting games.  Their audience recently grew quite a bit because of Dragonball FighterZ, which had over 2 million sales within the first week of release, but games like Blazblue haven’t had too many.  Their diversity in the Japanese branch isn’t too much, but in ASW America, the diversity is much more.