We start with Japan's two platform holders, Sony and Nintendo. Given the extraordinary performance of the PlayStation 4, it might be something of a surprise that Nintendo has had a much better year on the markets than Sony - but there's a story behind that. The performance of Nintendo peaks in August, as the markets responded to the success of Splatoon - proving the firm's ability to create brand new multi-million selling IP - but it first soared in mid-March, and experienced a sharp decline in early November, effectively defining the shape of Nintendo's stock price movement this year. That rise in March is the announcement that Nintendo plans to work with mobile publisher DeNA to release games for smartphones; the drop in November was the announcement that the first games under this partnership have been delayed. Essentially, everything else on Nintendo's graph - even the Splatoon-inspired spike - is just noise; all the stock market cared about this year was the potential of Nintendo IP on mobile devices.
By contrast, Sony's figures - while comfortably outperforming the Nikkei 225 - were fairly unremarkable. Shares rose nicely at the start of the year as the extent of the PS4's holiday sales performance became clear, but have flatlined and even declined slightly since then. The enormous success of Sony Computer Entertainment can't allay the markets' concerns about Sony's wider business. While PlayStation is becoming an increasingly vital part of the company, the turnaround strategy being executed by CEO Kaz Hirai is still a work in progress, and ongoing reports of disgruntlement among some of Sony's senior statesmen make investors a little nervous. It's the best year in a while for Sony's stock, but the company still has a lot to prove.
Looking now at the rest of Japan's "traditional" publishers, we can see that most of them performed reasonably well in 2016 - although the soaring success of America's top publishers wasn't replicated across the ocean. The only Japanese publisher that desperately underperformed the market was Sega Sammy, whose woes are largely down to factors outside of videogames; the bulk of the company's revenues are down to Pachinko and Pachislot - Japan's "it looks like gambling, it smells like gambling, it tastes like gambling, but we're legally required to say that it's definitely not gambling" habit of choice. The problem is that these games are slowly falling out of favour with consumers; nobody's quite sure if that's down to a generational shift, or the sharp decline in Japanese real incomes in recent years, or a bit of both, but it's certainly being felt on Sega Sammy's bottom line. Combine that with ongoing dithering over legislation permitting casinos to open in Japan and Korea alike, and the whole gambling (or "sort-of gambling") side of Sega Sammy's business is clearly on shaky ground.
"If [Nintendo's] mobile titles fail to impress, expect the share price to tank; there's a hell of a lot riding on whatever Nintendo and DeNA are brewing up"
Square Enix and Bandai Namco turned in fairly unremarkable results this year, broadly in line with the Nikkei 225's own movements, while keen news-watchers may be surprised to see Konami doing exceptionally well, almost doubling the gains of the broader index. The company may have lurched from debacle to disaster and back to debacle again in the specialist media this year - capping it all off with the genuinely cringe-worthy and infantile decision to ban Hideo Kojima from accepting awards for his own game, MGS5 - but the move towards a mobile-first strategy has been broadly welcomed by the stock markets, making Konami into one of the best performing game stocks in Japan this year. Way out in front, though, is Capcom; the company is smaller, in market capitalisation terms, than many of the others so it's easier for it to make significant gains, but regardless of that, it also executed extremely well this year and the markets seem particularly excited by the ongoing push to get the Monster Hunter franchise established on mobile.
Again, that Nintendo line is really all down to market excitement about the company going mobile. If its mobile titles fail to impress, expect the share price to tank; there's a hell of a lot riding on whatever Nintendo and DeNA are brewing up in their development studios.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-12-08-big-in-japan-game-stocks-in-2015
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