🍪 Elden Ring Was So Successful That Executives Found a Way to Be Mad About It

Hello there, Tarnished accountants, shareholder summons, and everyone who thought beating Malenia was the final boss. Today we are talking about Kadokawa, Oasis Management, Elden Ring, “material profit leakage,” and the beautiful corporate magic trick where a 30-million-copy success somehow becomes a boardroom complaint.

KADOKAWA Corporation, the Japanese media company that owns FromSoftware, Inc., has been under pressure from activist investor Oasis Management Company Ltd.. Oasis pushed to remove CEO Takeshi Natsuno, arguing that Kadokawa has failed to fully capitalize on FromSoftware’s global value. The center of the argument is not that Elden Ring failed. That would be ridiculous. The argument is that Elden Ring succeeded so much that Kadokawa should have captured more of the money.

The key phrase floating around this mess is “material profit leakage.” In normal human language, that means: Elden Ring made a mountain of money, but because FromSoftware worked with Bandai Namco for overseas publishing, a significant chunk of that global value went through Bandai Namco instead of staying inside Kadokawa and FromSoftware.

That is the part that makes this story both serious and deeply funny. Elden Ring is one of the most successful premium games of the last decade. It sold millions almost immediately, crossed 30 million copies, won major awards, spawned a massive DLC, expanded into Nightreign, and now even has a live-action movie coming from A24 and Alex Garland. Most companies would frame that as a legendary win. Some executives looked at it and apparently saw a spreadsheet with unfinished side quests.

The narrow take is this: Elden Ring was not a failure. Elden Ring is the exact opposite of a failure. What failed, if anything, was Kadokawa’s ability to capture every possible coin from the global success of one of the best games on Earth. And that is a very different conversation from pretending the game underperformed.

What actually happened

Oasis Management has been pressuring Kadokawa over its leadership, profitability, governance, and the way the company has monetized its biggest assets. Takeshi Natsuno has been CEO since 2021, and Reuters reported that Oasis wanted him out ahead of Kadokawa’s annual general meeting. Proxy advisors ISS and Glass Lewis also reportedly supported voting against his re-election.

Natsuno survived the shareholder vote, but Reuters reported that Oasis expected the final vote breakdown to show a significant loss of shareholder trust. Kadokawa said it would examine its management structure, executive compensation, medium-term plan progress, and shareholder engagement. In corporate language, that is the polite version of “the boss survived, but the room is still holding knives made of annual reports.”

The specific Elden Ring argument is about publishing. FromSoftware self-publishes in Japan, but Bandai Namco published Elden Ring overseas. Oasis argues that this setup caused value to leak away from Kadokawa because most Elden Ring sales were global, not domestic. According to Oasis’s own campaign materials, over 90% of Elden Ring sales were generated overseas and monetized by Bandai Namco, while less than 10% were captured in Japan by Kadokawa.

That is the shareholder anger. Not “Elden Ring failed.” Not “players rejected it.” Not “FromSoftware lost relevance.” The complaint is that FromSoftware created a money dragon, and Kadokawa did not own enough buckets when the dragon started shedding gold.

📢 “Material profit leakage” is the phrase. “A masterpiece was not converted into maximum shareholder extraction” is the translation.

🦊 Kiki: This is the kind of executive logic that makes you want to throw a controller into a quarterly earnings call. Elden Ring sold like crazy, won awards, became a cultural event, got a huge expansion, and is now becoming a movie. Players looked at it and saw one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Executives looked at it and said, “Okay, but why did the money not choose us exclusively?”

Amazing. Truly beautiful. We have reached the final form of corporate greed: being upset that the miracle was not optimized enough.

Imagine summoning a legendary dragon, watching it burn down every sales expectation in the kingdom, and then complaining because one merchant down the road sold some of the dragon T-shirts. That is not failure. That is loot goblin theology.

🍪 Chip floats beside a gigantic golden rune, wearing a tiny accountant visor, then slowly faints into a pile of royalty statements.

The numbers do not support the “failure” framing

Calling Elden Ring a failure requires ignoring almost every public metric that matters. The game sold around 12 million copies shortly after launch and later surpassed 30 million copies worldwide. It became one of the defining games of 2022, earned enormous critical acclaim, and picked up Game of the Year recognition from multiple major award bodies.

The expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, did what expansions almost never do at that scale. It sold 5 million units in its first three days. That is not DLC behaving like a small add-on. That is DLC walking into the room with boss music and its own tax bracket.

Then there is the movie. Bandai Namco and A24 announced a live-action Elden Ring adaptation written and directed by Alex Garland, filmed for IMAX, with a March 3, 2028 release date. That matters because studios do not build major film adaptations around failed brands. They do that around IP that has escaped the game aisle and started becoming a full entertainment property.

So the fair framing is not “Elden Ring failed.” The fair framing is “Elden Ring became so valuable that shareholders are now fighting over who should have captured more of the upside.” That is a business strategy fight, not a creative failure.

🦊 Kiki: I need everyone to appreciate how absurd this would sound in any normal room. “Our game sold 30 million copies, won everything, launched a monster DLC, expanded into spin-offs, and got an A24 movie. Unfortunately, we are furious.”

Furious about what, Chad? That the golden goose only laid golden eggs in three currencies instead of seven?

This is why players do not trust executive commentary. Developers make art under impossible pressure, players reward it, fans build entire communities around it, and then somewhere upstairs a C-suite wizard says, “But could the magic have produced a better margin profile?” Sir, the magic already produced Elden Ring. Maybe stop licking the spreadsheet.

🍪 Chip tries to hold up a sign that says “30 MILLION IS GOOD, RIGHT?” but the sign gets stamped “UNDER-MONETIZED” by an invisible corporate hand.

The part Oasis is not totally wrong about

The annoying thing is that Oasis’s argument is not nonsense. FromSoftware is no longer some risky niche studio hoping a publisher will take a chance on strange dark fantasy misery simulators. This is the studio behind Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Armored Core VI, and Elden Ring. Its brand has real global power.

From a business perspective, it is fair to ask whether FromSoftware should self-publish more of its future games, especially outside Japan. If Bandai Namco captures a large share of the international upside, Kadokawa shareholders will naturally ask why Kadokawa is not building the infrastructure to keep more of that value inside the group.

But there is another side to that. Publishing is not just pressing a button labeled “global sales, please.” International marketing, platform relationships, physical and digital distribution, localization, support, certification, risk management, launch operations, regional compliance, and community infrastructure are real functions. Bandai Namco did not simply sit near the Erdtree with a sack. It acted as the global publisher, and publishers get paid for taking risk and doing that work.

The smarter version of the Oasis argument is: FromSoftware may now be strong enough to reduce dependence on outside publishers in the future. The weaker version is: Elden Ring was so successful that the current deal must retroactively look stupid. That is an easy thing to say after the dragon is already dead and everyone knows where the loot chest was.

🦊 Kiki: This is where the investor take needs adult supervision. Yes, maybe Kadokawa should build stronger global publishing muscle. Yes, maybe FromSoftware is powerful enough now to demand better economics. Yes, maybe the old publisher model deserves a serious review.

But pretending the obvious outcome was obvious before launch is classic boardroom cosplay. Everybody is a genius after the boss drops the legendary weapon. “Ah, clearly we should have soloed Radahn with no summons.” Sure, Derek. Very brave. Please show us your forecast from 2021 where you predicted Elden Ring would become a 30-million-copy monster and a Hollywood pipeline. I’ll wait with Chip and a tiny cup of audit tea.

The problem with executive greed is not that it asks financial questions. The problem is that it acts like hindsight is strategy.

🍪 Chip opens a tiny treasure chest labeled “HINDSIGHT,” gets hit in the face by a quarterly projection, and rolls backward like a cursed cookie wheel.

Why players are reacting so strongly

A lot of player reaction comes from the emotional whiplash. Fans see Elden Ring as proof that a difficult, premium, mostly single-player, non-battle-pass game can dominate the industry. It became a symbol that not every major success needs seasonal monetization, daily quests, cosmetics, or a storefront trying to sell your dignity back to you in bundles.

That is why the “profit leakage” framing feels gross to people. Players hear “Elden Ring was not monetized enough” and immediately imagine executives wondering why there was no $14.99 Torrent armor pack, $9.99 Malenia emote, or “Lands Between Founders Pass.” Even if Oasis is talking about publishing economics, not microtransactions, the phrase lands in a market where players are already exhausted by corporate extraction.

There is also a deeper fear. When something as successful as Elden Ring is still treated as financially imperfect, what does that say to smaller studios? What does that say to teams who make great games but do not sell 30 million copies? If the masterpiece gets audited for not being maximized enough, everyone else is one bad quarter away from becoming “underperforming content.”

That does not mean shareholders have no right to demand better strategy. Kadokawa is a public company, and public companies answer to investors. But players are also right to notice the vibe. The vibe is not “how do we support more creative risks like Elden Ring?” The vibe is “how do we squeeze more value out of the thing after it worked?”

🦊 Kiki: And this is where I start chewing the furniture. Because every time the industry gets proof that players still love complete, difficult, weird, artist-led games, someone in a nicer chair asks how to make it more extractive.

Elden Ring did not need to chase every trend. It did not need to become a live-service hamster wheel. It did not need to explain every mystery with a glowing objective marker and a mascot saying, “Great job, Tarnished!” It respected players enough to let them suffer with dignity.

And after all that, the corporate conversation becomes: “But did we capture enough upside?”

That sentence should be a debuff. The moment a C-suite executive says it, a health bar should appear over their head and every developer in the building should get one free parry.

🍪 Chip equips a tiny buckler, attempts to parry the phrase “shareholder value,” and is immediately launched across the meeting room.

The bigger industry pattern

The broader pattern is that games are no longer judged only by whether they succeed. They are judged by whether they succeed in the most financially efficient, globally scalable, IP-expandable, shareholder-pleasing way possible. A game can sell millions, dominate social media, win awards, and still become evidence in an argument that someone left money on the table.

That is not unique to Kadokawa. It is the logic behind layoffs after profitable years, canceled games after strong engagement, and publishers chasing live-service money even when the audience is tired. Success is no longer the finish line. Success is the opening negotiation.

Elden Ring makes that pattern more visible because the creative result was so strong. This was not a cynical product rescued by monetization. It was a creative swing that became a global blockbuster. So when the money conversation turns sour, it exposes the gap between what players celebrate and what executives measure.

Players celebrate trust, discovery, quality, challenge, and identity. Executives measure margin, ownership, control, risk, revenue share, and future leverage. Neither side is imaginary. The problem starts when the second side talks as if the first side is just flavor text.

So was Elden Ring a failure?

No. Elden Ring was not a failure. Elden Ring was a generational success by sales, reviews, awards, cultural impact, and IP expansion. Anyone trying to call the game itself a failure is confusing “not perfectly monetized by one corporate parent” with “failed.”

The real question is whether Kadokawa can build a better global strategy for FromSoftware without damaging the creative engine that made FromSoftware valuable in the first place. That means more than yelling “self-publish” from the shareholder balcony. It means investment, infrastructure, patience, and respect for the studio’s creative identity.

Because the funniest and scariest possible outcome would be Kadokawa learning the wrong lesson. The lesson is not “Elden Ring should have been more corporate.” The lesson is that when a studio earns massive trust by making something bold, the business side should be smart enough to support that trust without trying to turn every rune into a subscription tier.

⚙️ Stay profit-aware like a Tarnished reading the fine print before touching a suspicious golden summon sign.

⚙️ Keep checking the business math like Chip trying to understand how 30 million copies became a complaint.

⚙️ And remember: if Elden Ring is your example of failure, your spreadsheet has been invaded by madness buildup.

🦊 Kiki · 🍪 Chip · ⭐ Byte · 🦁 Leo

Tips, leaks, and suspicious executive boss phases: contact us here!