I won’t quote the whole article, but I’ll paraphrase:
“The company is doing great—in fact, we just had our best year, in the middle of these trying economic times. Even so, I’m 63 this year, but we don’t really have a successor in line. If something happened to me, the company would have no choice but to fold, and I really want to avoid that. I don’t want to lose this legacy of amazing work we’ve created. This left us with the decision to seek out a company to acquire us. We landed on Tencent, the world’s leading entertainment company, and we are going to become a subsidiary of them.”
“I can say with confidence that, basically, regardless of what happens to me, this company will keep operating at full capacity in the same way it has been until now. There’s still plenty our staff want to accomplish—and part of that is creating intellectual property that is known across the world—but we want to continue with visual novels, kinetic novels, anime; everything we’ve been doing until now. If you think about it, we’ve been around for 33 years now, creating characters and worlds people love.”
It’s a long post and I didn’t read it all yet, but that’s about the first half of it (with some judicious cuts). It was an interesting read. Also, I didn’t capture the writing style at all 🙂
I don’t like that Tencent now owns Key, but the blog does a good job of explaining what led up to this acquisition.
Edit: “The world’s most valuable IP” was kind of a poor translation, so I changed it a little.
I think it’s a shame they went with Tencent, but I’ve heard they tend to be hands-off with their subsidiaries. I can only hope that will be the case with Visual Arts/Key.
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