Japanese games developer NatsumeAtari is exhibiting at G2E in Las Vegas for the first time this week, part of its expansion strategy into the land-based and iGaming markets.
Based out of Osaka, the company is looking to leverage its expertise in video games and pachinko in the global gaming space – potentially bringing a point of difference to an increasingly competitive landscape.
“We launched into iGaming with our initial concept four years ago through our gaming brand, Samurai Studio, although those four years have mainly entailed development time and building up all the games that we have here [at G2E],” says Kevin Humphreys (pictured, left), NatsumeAtari’s Business Development Manager.
“We have released two games in the US regulated markets and we are about to release a couple of games in the European regulated markets, both through aggregators.
“The concept of our studio is to bring the expertise that we’ve got in video games and pachinko into iGaming, and to try and localize the content more for the western markets that we are targeting while also retaining a little bit of Japanese flair.”
NatsumeAtari represents the coming together of two distinct brands: Natsume being a long-time producer of boutique video games for consoles like Nintendo, while Atari – not to be confused with the American console maker – is one of Japan’s pure play pachinko developers. For the record, Atari means “to hit” in Japanese.
The company already boasts some success in the land-based arena, having produced around 20 games including the likes of the Marilyn Monroe series of games in partnership with Australian slot machine supplier Ainsworth.
However, the rapid expansion of iGaming across the US and ongoing strength in its traditional European base provides a particularly attractive opportunity for NatsumeAtari to leverage its Japanese heritage.
“That’s what we want to try and keep as much as possible,” Humphreys says. “It’s a difficult balance because there is no shortage of examples of Japanese studios that have tried to really try and bring the pachinko style into iGaming and gaming as well only for the games to fall short in some ways.
“It’s about getting that balance between localizing for the local market yet still bringing something interesting and exciting for the operators.
“But we’ve been talking a lot to the aggregators and operators recently who say that before it was really about getting as much content as possible whereas now it seems they are looking more for interesting content, which is encouraging.”
With the company maintaining its focus purely on regulated markets, the Asia roadmap is less clear: NatsumeAtari is keeping an eye on the Philippines, although the online regulatory environment remains hazy, and on the Osaka IR project, although that is still many years away from opening.
But the time is right to step on the peddle in the US, starting with the company’s G2E presence.
“It’s our first time exhibiting and we want to work more on the sales and marketing side,” Humphreys explains. “Until now we’ve mostly been pure play developers but now that we have titles and we’re getting revenue share we have to be more proactive in our marketing.
“Our plan is to get some good games under our belt, get our own RGS (Remote Game Server) which we don’t have yet, get all the regulatory licenses and move up in scale, but overarching that is we want to make stuff that we find fun – take concepts that work in Japan, find what works over here and then perfect that to keep our games niche.”
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