GungHo to turn its hand to mobile publishing

Puzzle & Dragons creator GungHo is to expand into mobile games publishing, president Kazuki Morishita has confirmed.

Companies have been coming to us for years begging to publish their games. We are now getting ready to do that,” he told Bloomberg. There are so many cases where a company excels at development but slips up when it comes to publishing.

It’s just not something you can teach. It’s an accumulation of many years of practice, a kind of a secret sauce that has been infused into the pot.

Spurring the push is the fact that GungHo has made a considerable amount of cash from Puzzle & Dragons and now needs to find a way to spend it.

Big or small, we have an aggressive investment strategy in mind,” Morishita added. The cash keeps piling up every month, more than we need for in-house game development, and we need to find an effective way to use it.

Pretty much everything you can do with a smartphone has already been done. There isn’t much innovation in the industry these days. It’s extremely difficult. We’ll either strike out or hit a home run. The question is whether we can change people’s daily habits or not.”