Cave COO Talks About Company’s Future, Catering To Fans

Cave recently posted a few messages from their Chief Operating Officer, Mikio Watanabe, to their Facebook page. The messages touch upon a range of subjects, such as overseas publishing, the Japanese games market, and the arcade business.

You can read the message in its entirety below:

Xbox 360 Business (Overseas)

We’ve published Deathsmiles internationally with American and European publishers and I think we will continue to put them out in consultation with these partners. Also, at this August’s stock holder meeting, we’ll be officially changing our English name to “CAVE Interactive Co., Ltd.” For people in the English-speaking world, we sometimes get asked “CAVE? Is that a cliff-diving spot or something?”, so we decided to make it easier to understand. We are going to keep putting out games overseas strategically. We’ll keep growing our social game projects, but at the same time work on getting our games to core fans more than before.

The Domestic (Japanese) Market

Unfortunately the size of the Xbox 360 Japanese domestic market is about 30% of the PS3 market and hardcore games are only selling about 20 to 30,000 copies. Still, there is a solid fanbase for shooters and adventure games, and we will continue to support the system.

Arcade Games (Domestic)

It’s disappointing, but arcade games already do not make sense from a business perspective.

However, we will continue to develop arcade games since I believe that putting games out at Japanese game centers is an extremely effective marketing tool for CAVE’s shooters.

To all our overseas arcade game fans.

Consider picking up our future arcade boards via mail order!

If we sell 500 copies, we can make a new arcade shooter.

A request for overseas fans:

Also, a request for our international fans.

We’ve translated the CAVE homepage into English.

We’re also supporting our international fanbase via twitter, Ustream and facebook. Please give us your comments. Our English-speaking staff read what you write and pass that on to the creators here.

These quotes are unpublished snippets of an interview recently conducted by Pocket Gamer with Cave, regarding their mobile and social games.