Cygames, Inc. is a Japanese video game development studio established in 2011 by CyberAgent. Mobile and E-commerce company DeNA acquired a 24% stake in the studio in 2012, and Nintendo acquired another 5% stake in 2018. From its formation, the company produced mobile games, initially on the Mobage platform, and from 2013 on Android and iOS. The company headquarters is located in Tokyo while other divisions are located in Osaka and Saga in Japan and Seoul, South Korea. Key IPs include Rage of Bahamut, The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls, Granblue Fantasy, and Shadowverse. The company began development of console games in 2015. In 2016 Cygames announced the establishment of an anime studio CygamesPictures. The company also began funding anime for its mobile property and for new projects and adaptations for anime. The company also entered the manga, music and design market in the time period. Granblue Fantasy is one of the "Cygames superhero" franchises, making the 31st highest-grossing mobile game ever.
History
Cygames, Inc. was established in 2011 by CyberAgent, a Japanese web services company. In 2012, DeNA purchased a 24% stake in Cygames. Shortly thereafter, the studio was chosen by Gamasutra as one of the top 10game developers of the year. In June 2012, Cygames founded CyDesignation, a company specialized in Design, Illustration, Game planning and Game development. In March 2016, Cygames announced the establishment of its own anime production division and anime studio as a subsidiary known as CygamesPictures to do planning, production and animation both for Cygames own IPs and original anime projects as well. In June 2016, Cygames announced the acquisition of the gaming and anime background studio Kusanagi. In 2016, Cygames announced that it was developing Project Awakening, its first large-format title for consoles as well as the establishment of their Osaka studio focused on console games. In May 2017, Cygames and Kodansha announced that they formed a partnership to launch a new label called Cycomi. The new label is made for a print release in volumes distributed by Kodansha for the manga already published online by Cygames in its own site and app called Cycomics like the ones based on their property but also completely new ones. On June 8, 2017, Cygames and its parent company CyberAgent announced that they jointly established CA-Cygames Anime Fund”, a fund for investing in anime IP which will inject funds to the anime production committee to obtain the rights to stream anime videos on the Internet and produce games with a total amount of funds to be 3 billion yen. In 2017, Cygames founded its esports team, Cygames Beast, with Street Fighter players Daigo Umehara, Snake Eyez, and PR Balrog. Since July 2017, Cygames is an official sponsor of Juventus Football Club. In April 2018, a partnership with Nintendo was announced to develop the gameDragalia Lost, for the purpose of facilitating the partnership Nintendo will obtain approximately 5 percent of Cygames's issued stocks. In May 2018, Cygames announced the establishment of a subsidiary for music production and artist management called Cymusic. In September 2019, Tencent Games and Nexon plans to acquire Cygames Superheroes properties for Chinese and Korean publishers.
Games developed
Cygames Superheroes franchise
Those are fantasy-themed crossmedia projects of the company that are made available on different media like manga, anime, games and live events based on Cygames series, called Cygames Superheroes.
