Comcept is Purchased by Level-5

It's hard to keep perspective sometimes, when you work in the gaming news industry. Keiji Inafune has had his good name sullied somewhat thanks to the utter cluster-fricks that were Mighty No. Nine and Red Ash, kickstarted projects that were kind of bad and just plain wasn't successful, respectively. But despite his most recent failures, his company, Comcept, has had just as many successes as it has had failures. For example, they made ReCore, which turned out to be pretty good, and of their earlier titles, they also worked on Soul Sacrifice, a semi-obscure PS4 game in 2014.

So stepping back and looking at the big picture, you can see why another publisher might be interested in acquiring such a studio. And in this case, that studio would be Professor Layton and Yokai Watch developer Level-5, who announced last friday that they would be purchasing and re-branding Comcept into Level-5 Comcept, based out of Osaka. Akihiro Hino, the man behind Professor Layton will be acting as the CEO, while Inafune himself will be the CCO.

The company, as you might expect, will be making games. Their first game, in fact, was already announced in Japan, a free-to-play mobile app called Dragon & Colonies, set to be released in 2018.

So what's the real take-away here? Level-5 has a solid history of producing good games, while Comcept has always been more ambitious even if their ability to execute those ambitions well have been wanting. I feel like Level-5 will help keep Inafune more grounded, and maybe more able to focus on producing good content. I mean, he's still the mind behind Megaman and Dead Rising, so some credit is still owed to him for that.

If this team will be trusted with other big-name Level-5 IP, though? I'm not sure, but I wouldn't bet my giant hat on it...