Big news! Thanks for posting this.

The CEO gives his reasons for retiring here:

じゃあ、なんで私が引退するかっていうと、これはもうハッキリしていて、人間にはどうしても「寿命」ってのがあるから、なんだよなぁ。

私もできることなら永遠に、この素晴らしい会社を経営していきたいよ。だけど、さすがに私も当年とって63歳。もちろん、今は健康そのものだし、まだまだ仕事もしたいけど、もはやいつ何があってもおかしくない年齢になってきたんだよね。

I won’t quote the whole article, but I’ll paraphrase:

“The company is doing great—in fact, we just had our best year, in the middle of these trying economic times. Even so, I’m 63 this year, but we don’t really have a successor in line. If something happened to me, the company would have no choice but to fold, and I really want to avoid that. I don’t want to lose this legacy of amazing work we’ve created. This left us with the decision to seek out a company to acquire us. We landed on Tencent, the world’s leading entertainment company, and we are going to become a subsidiary of them.”

“I can say with confidence that, basically, regardless of what happens to me, this company will keep operating at full capacity in the same way it has been until now. There’s still plenty our staff want to accomplish—and part of that is creating intellectual property that is known across the world—but we want to continue with visual novels, kinetic novels, anime; everything we’ve been doing until now. If you think about it, we’ve been around for 33 years now, creating characters and worlds people love.”

It’s a long post and I didn’t read it all yet, but that’s about the first half of it (with some judicious cuts). It was an interesting read. Also, I didn’t capture the writing style at all 🙂

I don’t like that Tencent now owns Key, but the blog does a good job of explaining what led up to this acquisition.

Edit: “The world’s most valuable IP” was kind of a poor translation, so I changed it a little.