Today, Japanese game dev studio Kaga Create announced its dissolution. The company was, in fact, dissolved on December 31, 2015, it announced in a press release [Japanese, PDF] and has begun liquidating its assets. It’ll be accepting offers on its assets for the next two months.
The company cites competition from the smartphone market, and its inability to grow in the face of that competition, for its failure.
While Kaga Create is all but unknown in the West, it had released its latest game just a few days before its shutdown: On December 24, a PlayStation Vita game, Witch Love Diary: Dragon x Caravan (pictured) hit the market.
The company had also released several mobile games in 2015, as recently as August; on its official website, every game has a “service terminated” notice next to its title.
Kaga Create is likely most notable to Western players and developers as the successor to Naxat Soft — a publisher known for early 1990s cult hits like Alien Crush and Devil’s Crush for the TurboGrafx-16. Under its Western Taxan brand, it published NES games like 8 Eyes and Low G Man. Presumably, rights to many of these games — some of which had popped up on Wii Virtual Console — are up for grabs in the liquidation.
Kaga Create was a subsidiary of Kaga Electronics, which was founded in 1968 and which will continue to operate; it has a wide array of subsidiaries that are still in business.
This isn’t the first game-related Kaga subsidiary that the company has recently shut down; in 2013, Kaga put the axe to Cyber Front, which was notable for being the Japanese publisher of Western-developed games including Portal and The Walking Dead.
It’s also not the only small Japanese console publisher to go belly-up at the end of 2015; Agatsuma Entertainment, lately publishers of the Umihara Kawase franchise, shut down on December 11.