The developer of Anime Fighting Game Community favorite Arcana Heart, Examu, has announced that the company will be ceasing operations at the end of February 2020.
Founded in 2007, as Yuki Enterprise, Examu filled a specific niche in the Japanese game development market by producing arcade releases of fighting games. Samurai Showdown V and Million Arthur are two of the more recent arcade releases from Examu. Examu’s biggest original series of releases was the Arcana Heart games. Arcana Heart games distinguish themselves in the fighting game genre with an all-woman roster and, in the third iteration, a unique homing dash mechanic. There have been three games in the Arcana Heart series along with a few re-releases that bundle DLC content into the main games. The most recent game Arcana Heart 3: Love MAX Six Stars!!! was released three years ago in 2017 and has been played at the AnimEVO pro fighting game tournament since its launch.
There was some cause for hope for Arcana Heart fans in the announcement. Members of the Examu team who previously worked on the Arcana Heart games will continue to support the series as the newly formed Team Arcana. Specifically, Team Arcana will take over development, operation, and product support for the series.
While the overall quality of the games has been improving steadily over the past few years many have struggled to find commercial success. Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 and other big games have had solid releases but have not necessarily hit as big as past iterations of the series in terms of sales. This reveals a problem in esports more generally, good spectator games are sometimes not worth making. Unless the developer is big enough to run their own esports events and leverage a game’s popularity among spectators into revenue it might not be worth it to make some of the more niche titles.
One possible hope for the Fighting Game genre could be adapting other games to the genre. The recently released Granblue Fantasy: Versus, for example, adapts characters from a visual novel to a fighting game.
Source: Press Release
