Isekai Bust - Kadokawa blames recent excessive Isekai stories for decline in profitability

[Archaic]

Kadokawa cites excessive reliance on the isekai genre as one of the major causes of the decline in profitability in its domestic publishing business - AUTOMATON WEST

In its new mid-term management plan Kadokawa addresses recent financial losses driven by the company's "bias towards proven genres."

automaton-media.com

In the recently published mid-term management plan for the period between FY 2026 and FY 2031, Kadokawa cites “excessive reliance on existing winning patterns” as one of the major factors contributing to the decline in profit across the publishing sector.

Specifically, the company has acknowledged a recent bias towards “proven genres,” such as isekai and narou-kei, inevitably leading towards market saturation and worsening profitability. According to Kadokawa, the formulaic approach and a clear lack of depth of content diversity is what’s been preventing its domestic publication business from exploring new genres and taking on innovative projects.

While Kadokawa has been actively implementing measures and hiring more editors in order to expand the number of published titles without bearing a load on its staff, this has also proven to negatively impact its business, leading to an “increase in titles lacking originality or quality.”

I wish I could say that I'm surprised it took Kadokawa this long to acknowledge the problem, but I'm really not. My only concern is that this could lead to a knee-jerk that results in some legitimately good series being ignored or put on the backburner. After all, the problem isn't "stories where a character or characters are transported to or reincarnated in another world". It's the combination of that base setting with a whole bunch of standard tropes and the harem genre, which has made everything stale and cookiecutter. It's been like the old joke about anime girl faces being all the same from the 90s and early 200s, where each character just a combination of eye colour, hair, and an optional accessory (glasses, hair ribbon, etc), only this time it's at the scale of stories rather than individual characters. I can only hope that things like the Rayearth remake series coming out later this year will inspire some authors to explore other avenues for the broader isekai genre.

 

[Ryoma Maser]

I wish I could say I was surprised it was any anime company or publisher that finally realize this and acknowledge it, considering the swarm of isekai ever since it boomed with Re:Zero and Trashsuba back before the 2020s. Now this isn't saying all isekai are bad, but the fact we get so many now and barely any major change on the genre is a big issue.

I think in general, I think now reincarnation stories are being big especially with Villainess stories too. Oshi no Ko (which is also trash before the trash twist) ran into this issue with reincarnation being a plot point but handled it so wrong but then we just suddenly have all these reincarnation stories being isekai, villainess, or something else. Like there's some I like Reincarnated as a Sword which actual does something with that stuff, but a lot of it is just the same but also giving it the overpowered cliche.

Ironically some of my favorites in recent years have been isekai but only really have it as a backdrop and rarely they play the isekai up like The Weakest Tamer, Dahlia in Bloom. Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf also is one to mention since it's a reverse and a regular isekai where the main human can travel between worlds but then accidentally brings a native with him so it becomes a isekai for the elf.

While I wish for less isekai and others of these reincarnation stories, I hope this realization brings for more genres for variety but also actual attempts at the isekai genre being different (I remember one anime I forget the title, where people kept getting isekai'd to their world and led to so many problems that anyone new brought is killed as soon as possible, effectively realizing the issues of the genre and what this stuff ends up doing).

 

[theclaw]

The amusement of the long titles is a lot of the draw. When overseas publishers opt to abbreviate, it loses something.