Warner Music Japan’s Takehito Masui & MIXI Inc. CEO Talk Monster Strike, Future of Sports & Music

Koki Kimura is the man behind the smartphone game Monster Strike, which has gone on to become a popular content brand worldwide, bringing in over $10 billion in revenue. In June 2018 he was appointed president of MIXI Inc., and he has been focusing the company’s efforts on sports business. Takehito Masui of Warner Music Japan talked with Kimura about what led to his turning Monster Strike into more than just a game, expanding it into a full range of entertainment that includes real-world events, music, and anime. Kimura discussed what he has hoped to accomplish by doing so and what he sees as the future of sports and music.

Takehito Masui: You’re currently the president of MIXI, but originally you were a game producer. Your smartphone game Monster Strike was a huge hit, with one trillion yen in revenue over a six year period. What do you think made it so successful at capturing people’s hearts?

Kimura: I think everyone has a desire to stay in constant contact with their old and trusted friends. In fact, they’re looking for excuses to stay connected. If you’re an adult, you can create opportunities to stay connected by saying, “I’ve got this work, do you want to do it together?” I was thinking that children also needed some sort of pretext to play together. AAA games had satisfied that need in the past, but now people were playing mobile games instead. I think that’s what led to Monster Strike’s explosive popularity.

Masui: Thanks to Monster Strike’s success, MIXI’s market capitalization grew 30-fold, from roughly 20 billion yen to roughly 600 billion yen. At the time, you were still a game creator. The environment around you has changed dramatically, but has your mindset also undergone any changes? 

Kimura: Yes. One of the big changes was that I started paying attention to what was going on overseas. In 2015, Monster Strike had the highest annual sales of any smartphone app in the world, but most of those sales came from Japan. If you do business that exclusively targets the local Japanese market, you’ll quickly reach your limits. However, the whole world needs communication tools, not just Japan. When I started thinking “we might be successful overseas, too,” I started travelling far more often to overseas locations such as the U.S., Korea, and China.

Masui: In around 2018, Monster Strike evolved from being just a game to being an entire entertainment brand. Music became a much bigger part of it.

Kimura: We expanded it from games to a broader range of entertainment with an eye toward using the power of a mix of media to provide people with more opportunities use to extend invitations to others. Our idea was that this would make it possible for people to reach out even to folks who didn’t enjoy gaming.

Masui: Your owned media for sharing Monster Strike news includes an official Monster Strike YouTube channel. Currently (as of September 2023) there are 1.33 million subscribers. Then you launched the Monster Strike Anime TV channel. That has 640,000 subscribers (as of September 2023). The Monster Strike anime generated a lot of buzz, leading to a theatrical anime release.

Kimura: Collaborations were a big factor behind us branching out into anime. Our IP collaborations go all the way back to April 2014 with our Rascal the Raccoon IP collaboration. Then, starting with Evangelion in May 2015, we sold characters within Monster Strike. Of course, there are some people who start Monster Strike expressly for the characters featured in collaborations, but even more than that, it brings people together because they’re saying “hey, I hear Monster Strike’s doing an XYZ tie-up!”

We believed that a story could provide the game with even more added value, so why not make the story ourselves? And that’s what led to us making the anime. Monster Strike itself is a simple action game, so it’s not great at setting up a story and getting people emotionally invested.

Masui: Then you got into music, starting with the Monster Strike Orchestra, right?

Kimura: For our orchestra project, we were inspired by Dragon Quest. The music used in Monster Strike is orchestral, so we thought it would sound great if we had it performed by an orchestra, like Dragon Quest.

Masui: Then there’s the spin-off “Monsoni!” which consists of music played by game characters. The game’s characters have become musical artists, playing their own original music. What were you aiming for with this strategy?

Kimura: My own approach is to make surprising users our highest priority, so every day I thought about what we could do next that would really surprise our users. I thought, “I’m sure they were surprised with the orchestra, so what’s next?” I figured it would be fun if we did a pop music collaboration.

Actually, to let you in a little on my ulterior motives, with pop music, idols, and bands, there are a lot of fans not only of the music but also of the artists that create it. You don’t see that kind of excitement with an orchestra. So I thought if we made the characters of the game into idols, we could not only produce musical excitement, but also make hit characters. Then we could sell those bands and groups in the game. We developed our plans with the twin goals of sharing Monster Strike in a new way, through music, and of developing new products for use within the game.

Masui: The characters in the game have their own personalities, and in the anime they’re voiced. The voice actors from the anime also perform the song vocals, and the music is sold on physical CDs, just like flesh-and-blood artists. The personal qualities of the characters are consistent across all the media they appear in. There have been artists that started out as anime characters, but what makes this interesting is that even before that, these characters were game characters.

In 2016, you started your XFLAG PARK live entertainment shows (now called “DREAMDAZE”). What was your aim with this?

Kimura:  The phrase “content marketing” may sound a little dry, but there’s a certain passion that you just can’t generate with bought media. That kind of passion can only be generated by creating it through content.

Our idea was to reap the returns through the game, so we don’t aim to recoup the full cost through tickets alone. At a recent DREAMDAZE, we revealed the new Lucifer Transcension: Kai. After the event, the character sold exceptionally well. We can recoup the costs that way, so even if events are costly, we want to create new things people have never seen before.

Masui: The 2019 XFLAG PARK attracted 40,000 people and 340,000 people watched the live stream. That scale rivals many famous music festivals. I’d imagine that you did this to broaden the range of opportunities you’re presenting people to extend invitations to their friends. Have you had any difficulties in reaching fans who are normally focused on entirely different genres?

Kimura: I don’t think there’s very much conflict. Monster Strike is, essentially, about getting together with friends or family members, bringing your smartphones to the same place and having fun together. In that sense, it’s not so much an online game as an offline game.

Some people might not like a particular artist at first, but through the process of playing with friends, having a shared experience with them as they take in the artist’s work, many will gain an appreciation for the artists. For example, when people go to karaoke and everyone sings an artist’s songs, the songs become a shared language and everyone has a fun time. That’s why I think Monster Strike is a really good fit for music and artists.

Masui: What are your plans for overseas markets?

Kimura: I want to continue our philosophy of sharing the value of communication with people around the world. Right now, we’re focusing on Asia. Asia’s population is huge. India, in particular, is a population giant, home to 1.4 billion people. 25 million babies are born every year. The population will provide a powerful boost in the future, and I think we might see Asia developing a strong economic sphere that surpasses those of the U.S. and Europe.

Looking at smartphone communications alone, India has a 46% smartphone adoption rate, making it the country with the second highest number of smartphone users, behind China. Also, due to political reasons, Chinese apps such as TikTok are banned in India. I think that, as a country closed off to China, India presents tremendous business opportunities to us as a Japanese company.

—This interview by Yuuka Higaki first appeared on Billboard Japan