Nippon Ichi Opens Two Game Development Subsidiaries, Cancels One Key Title

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Nippon Ichi announced to investors that an unannounced title was canceled, which caused the Disgaea developer to absorb a 14 million yen ($167,000) loss.

Even with this loss, Nippon Ichi expects sales and operating profit to soar past expectations and that’s thanks to Disgaea 4. Retailers have requested additional shipments of the PlayStation 3 game, which increased Nippon Ichi’s total sales to 2.1 billion yen ($25 million) from 1.9 billion yen ($23 million). Operating profit jumped from 143 million yen ($1.7 million) to 278 million yen ($3.3 million).

Some of these earnings will probably be used to boost their new subsidiaries. Nippon Ichi opened Nora and Counterstop, two studios, built with game developers in mind, designed to create original titles in the consumer video game space. Nippon Ichi has three other subsidiaries: NIS America, ClaDun developer System Prisma, and Studio ToOeuf, which is led by Disgaea artist Takehito Harada. With all of these studios, Nippon Ichi hopes to be able to release four major titles each year.

That’s in the future, though. Right now Nippon Ichi is focusing on releasing additional downloadable content (free and paid) for Disgaea 4. The publisher plans on strengthening download services in Japan and overseas.