I believe the real news is "took their seven-year-old mobile games studio public Friday, and the stock doubled" which is impressive, but one of them had been in investment banking before and both appear to have been independently wealthy before.<p>Plus their games serve a well established genre.<p>So this isn't quite the new idea rags to riches story that it is presented as. Mostly, this says a lot about how Japanese society still has clear gender roles.
That's great for them. There's seriously a huge market for large female audiences. For example, women can command way more money from advertisers on YouTube given equally (very large) viewership and subscriber bases.<p>I think we'll see a lot of women begin to capitalize on this in larger and larger numbers in the next year in things that are generally not associated with women (military things, video games, strength training, etc.)
I'm not sure why this particular firm was picked as a 'first' for Otome games, when they have been a thing for a very long time.
Even from the hardship angle it seems odd, considering there's Idea Factory (or its otome subsidiaries at least) being female led since their earliest days, and they had to do it many years ago when it would arguably be harder to do so.
It's totally OT, but I find mesmerizing the video inside the article describing "how to draw Totoro from a leading anime film producer".
Now I'm scribbling all over my block notes :)
Worth being aware that this genre is essentially romance novels in game form. So it's capitalizing on sex drive, just like porn does, not some clever nuanced understanding of how to make conventional games appeal to women. Nothing wrong with that, but the article hides the fact for some reason.
Twin sisters? Call them game developers or entrepreneurs and if you want to highlight their sex just write out female in front but don’t degrade them them to being twin sisters.