A couple with a baby in the Marvelous game Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life

Story of Seasons Studio Marvelous Changes Leadership Due to Poor Performance

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Published: February 3, 2025 9:27 AM

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.

The player farming on a grid in the Marvelous game Farmagia
Games like November's Farmagia failed to make enough of a dent to improve Marvelous' finances, it seems.

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.

The latter, according to Marvelous, performed "steadily", but there's no indication as to how the former did. Given the change in leadership and Farmagia's terminally low Steam review count, however, it's unlikely the game sold particularly well.

It is worth noting that a new Rune Factory game, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, is coming in May, but since Marvelous' financial year ends in March, the game won't be released in time for it to affect the studio's 2024-25 fiscals.

The player holding up a farming implement amongst crops in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, a Marvelous game
Marvelous is gearing up to release Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma in March.

It remains to be seen whether Marvelous' change in leadership will affect how the company operates, as well as whether it'll turn the studio's fortunes around. Stay tuned for more on this and all other things Marvelous.

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Joe has been writing for TechRaptor for several years, and in those years has learned a lot about the gaming industry and its foibles. He’s originally an… More about Joseph