I recently saw a reference to “Koei Tecmo” and found out that Koei and Tecmo have merged. It looks like almost all the large Japanese games software companies now have two-part names (aside from Sony and Nintendo obviously).
The Japanese games industry consolidation has been going for a while though. I made this diagram in order to visualise recent mergers:
The pairings seem fairly natural though… except for Square Enix buying Eidos… maybe they wanted to get into Europe. Also, from a consumer perspective, Taito seemed more suited to Namco Bandai.
I’ve love to see a massive diagram showing the flow of money, ownership, licenses, staff, and intellectual property between games companies internationally. I started on something… but it became fairly overwhelming very quickly.