Why a 130-Year-Old Japanese Kabuki Company Is Getting Into Video Games
At events such as Summer Game Fest and the Game Developers Conference, there’s never any shortage of evening events to attend. There are business summits, parties, cultural events, dinners, and more hosted by individuals and companies large and small, all organized to forge connections and “network” after a long day of talks, panels, interviews, demos, and whatever else. At my first Tokyo Game Show this year, I was warned that TGS wasn’t really much of a show for big evening events – a small rash of after-show parties was a relatively new thing, so I shouldn’t expect too many heavy demands on my time.
But everyone I spoke to was going to Shochiku’s sushi party.
Until they reached out to invite me to Japan this year, I’d never heard of Shochiku. That’s because it’s a relative newcomer to the games space despite being a major company elsewhere in Japan’s entertainment industry. It was begun as a kabuki company over a century ago, and has ridden the waves of cultural change, technological growth, and shifting tastes around entertainment ever since. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that video games are the next step, and it’s going in with gusto.
Shochiku was founded in 1895 to manage kabuki theaters in Kyoto, initially, and expanded over time into other types of theater. It entered film production in 1920, making it one of the oldest companies in Japan involved in film production today, and pioneered a number of technologies and styles in Japan over the years. It released the first “talkie” made in Japan in the 30s, and years later started distributing theatrical anime such as the Cardcaptor Sakura, Ghost in the Shell, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Full Metal Alchemist films.
Despite its storied history, Shochiku is very, very new to gaming. It first dipped its toe in just last year, focusing on publishing and financing smaller games in Japan and more broadly in Asia such as MiSide, BrokenLore, Return from Core, Backpack Battles, and upcoming games Sonzai and Eternal Palace Sakura. That’s plenty to be getting on with already, but this year, Shochiku has begun doing even more. In March, the company announced a $100,000 game accelerator program focused on middleware, infrastructure, and other game-enhancing technologies. It’s a path to funding not for games themselves, but for the technology that helps them exist in the first place.
Shochiku says it received 200 submissions for its program, and ultimately chose two to receive $50,000 in funding: Blacknut Cloud Gaming and AI motion tools company Ememe Co. At Shochiku’s Demo Day event in Tokyo ahead of Tokyo Game Show 2025, a number of different startups pitched their projects to a room of fellow developers, startups, investors, and publishers. The pitches included game trend analytics, game experience personalization, 3D model generation, a focus app with customizable avatars, and others (many of which were tied back to or heavily used generative AI, which is seemingly on the rise in Japanese game development).
Blacknut and Ememe also showed off their products. The two companies couldn’t be more different. Blacknut is a cloud gaming subscription service that, per VP of business development and licensing Nabil Laredj, is focused on casual gamers – the massive number of individuals who play games, say, weekly instead of daily. They’re not hardcore – they’re not locked into the latest gaming news, they often play games weeks or months after they release, and they don’t care deeply about framerates – but they’re consistent, interested, and multitudinous. Blacknut’s finding them on PC and mobile, but is also integrating its service into smart TVs and is available with telecom services in a number of different countries. So while you may not hear about Blacknut on sites like IGN in the same breath as services like Xbox Game Pass or even Amazon Luna, it’s quietly enabling thousands of people globally to play games in roughly the same way.
Ememe is something entirely different. The company is making developer tools, primarily a generative AI tool that it claims will save time and cost on animation in 3D games by using “text-to-motion” to animate 3D characters automatically, instead of a developer having to manually adjust movements. In the presentation, CEO Yuka Kojima demonstrated by typing “go down the stairs” into the tool, which prompted a 3D character to begin walking down a flight of stairs. Kojima says this tool works with all sorts of movements, including walking across a room, picking up a glass, sitting on a couch, and so forth. Currently Ememe exists as a Unity plugin, and Unreal Engine support is in development as well.
Companies investing in game tech is hardly a remarkable story, but Shochiku in particular is representative of a budding larger trend in Japan particularly of companies from outside gaming stepping in and stepping up with funding for the next generation of games and tech. Globally, the games industry has seen a broader withdrawal of investment money in recent years, particularly from Chinese gaming giants such as NetEase and Tencent as well as basically every major Western company. As a result, a number of companies around the globe have seen mass layoffs, shuttered projects, and even closed studios. AAA projects sputter out before they can even be announced, and indie developers struggle for what scraps of funding they can find. While a handful of companies (and, in Saudi Arabia’s case, an entire country) are stepping in to fill that gap, the portrait of the wider global games industry is currently a bleak one. During my trips to GDC, SGF, and the DICE Summit in Las Vegas earlier this year, I spoke to developer after developer whose mantra for the event was simply to find ways to survive the money drought. There were few people to pitch to, and little hope of funding – at least in 2025.
And yet, the Japan game development scene is mercifully, miraculously floating above much of this strife. This is in no small part thanks to strict laws around layoffs and other worker protections forcing companies to behave more conservatively in their investments while retaining talent, alongside the local success of mobile gaming helping pour funding into the market. And in recent years, companies such as manga publisher Shueisha, Shochiku, and the government itself through So-Fu, are taking a special interest in supporting Japanese indie development and the tech required to fuel it. After all, it’s less expensive than AAA to fund, and audiences are craving more unique new experiences. While indie developers have existed in Japan as long as there has been a game development scene at all, interest has been growing significantly in the last few years, out from and beyond the beloved and successful Japanese indie event BitSummit, which just celebrated its 13th year.
Which is not to say that Japan is magically immune from the economic pressures faced by the rest of the industry, nor that indies are already booming there. Tokyo Game Show this year was overwhelmed with AAA games we’ve seen elsewhere already, a mix of games soon to be released that have already been seen at Gamescom or Summer Game Fest, and free-to-play, gacha, live service games that have been out for years. Big, sparkly, brand new games were few and far between (and commanded massive attention, as demonstrated by Ananta). Though there was plenty to see in the indie hall, much of it was given over to merchandise booths and services. And an event survey indicates that 51% of Japanese game makers are using generative AI, a percentage that seems high compared to recent global industry surveys, and a bit alarming given fears surrounding the technology’s impacts on the job market, environment, and overall output quality. But it does, perhaps, explain why so many of the investment pitches showing up for Shochiku’s Demo Day were generative AI-focused to begin with.
Alongside funding from its accelerator, Shochiku is also working to foster connections between startups and big players with even more money to invest. I was lucky enough to ride along with Shochiku, Ememe, and Blacknut on a trip to visit two major investors: Sony Ventures and SEGA, where I got to sit in the room and listen to the two startups make pitches for funding, partnership, and support thanks to Shochiku’s introduction. Whether or not any of these companies end up working together remains to be seen, nor is it clear what relationships will actually blossom from Shochiku’s Demo Day. But the effort to connect active investors, developers, startups, publishers, and service providers was noticed around Tokyo Game Show. Almost everyone I spoke to had heard of Shochiku’s Demo Day and subsequent sushi-focused networking event; the latter event was well-attended by several hundreds of people and a rarity at a convention more typically followed by smaller, more exclusive meet-ups.
It’s been several years running of immensely depressing industry conventions. For that, we can thank those behind the layoffs of thousands of game developers, the shuttering of dozens of projects known and unknown, and the closure of studio after studio following a rash of irresponsible overinvestment and the subsequent downturn in the wake of the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every show, I’m asked when I think things will pick up again, and on a global scale, I’m still not sure. But there’s some optimism to be found in companies like Shochiku – a kabuki and film company with absolutely nothing to do with gaming and no reason to risk anything – looking at that blue ocean and deciding now’s an all right time for a swim.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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