Marvelous, the studio behind franchises like Story of Seasons (formerly Harvest Moon) and Rune Factory, has announced a change in leadership owing to its poor financial performance over the last nine months.
Per an Automaton Media report, the studio recently published its financial results for the first three quarters of the 2024-25 fiscal year, and sales and net profit are both down (by 4.8% and 12.4% respectively) when compared to the same period last year.
As a result, current CEO Sato Suminobu will step down from his position in March, although he'll remain a director at the company. He'll be replaced as company CEO by Shinichi Terui, who's currently serving as an executive director at Marvelous.
In the Gamebiz report that Automaton cites (for which we're using machine translation), it also sounds as though both Sato and Terui will receive 10% pay cuts, although Automaton says these cuts will apply to "two full-time executives" rather than the two named employees.
As Automaton points out, Marvelous released two major projects in the nine-month period between April and December 2024, namely farming RPG Farmagia and a re-release of the remake of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town....
