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Konami Gets Hudson Soft As Subsidiary

Japanese publishing and development giant Konami has announced that it is making Japanese-headquartered Bomberman creator Hudson Soft a wholly owned subsidiary, fo...

Simon Carless, Blogger

April 11, 2005

1 Min Read
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Japanese publishing and development giant Konami has announced that it is making Japanese-headquartered Bomberman creator Hudson Soft a wholly owned subsidiary, following continued financial trouble for the smaller developer, which has recently completed PSP title Rengoku: Tower Of Purgatory. According to an official Japanese statement from both companies, Konami will buy 3 million new Hudson shares for 1.43 billion yen ($13.26 million) on April 27th, giving it over 50% of the shares in the company, and therefore allowing Hudson Soft to be officially included as an auxiliary division of Konami. Hudson Soft co-founder Hiroshi Kudo previously resigned back in November 2004, due to the expected loss of 7.3 billion yen ($69m) for the financial year ending March 31st, 2005, another sign of Hudson's problems that have led to this change of ownership. As well as its assimilation of Hudson Soft, which has 530 employees, and which it previously held a large stake in, Konami also owns significant portions of other Japanese game developers including Atlus and Takara.

About the Author

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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