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http://www.index-hd.com/press/?p=864

During the Board of Director’s Meeting on the 12th of February, it has been decided that Atlus will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Index Holding through a stock swap. The effective date of the stock swap will take place on the 10th of May.

Atlus will no longer be listed on JASDAQ after the stock swap takes effect.

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This kind of stock swap typically only take place when the parent company isn’t happy with how the subsidiary is being run, and wish to assert full control over the decision made by their subsidiaries.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Atlus’ history, the company first faced a financial crisis in 2004 and they were acquired by Takara.

Takara then merged funds with a few other companies and Index Holding was formed as the holding company for these companies. Atlus was then transferred to Index Holding as a subsidiary.

At that point, Index Holding only have ~55% of the shares of Atlus, and Atlus as a whole are still able to make decision independent of Index.

Fast-forward to now. Atlus hasn’t been doing well the last few years. P3/4 and the Trauma Center series are relatively successful, but their arcade division as a whole made severe losses.

NINE was also a flop and Imagine was also consuming so much resources that they had to dump it out to Cave to continue.

Strange Journey didn’t sell that well either. In fact, the PSP remake of P3 outsold it.

Due to their losses and the bad economy, Atlus had to sell and/or close down some of their subsidiaries back in November, hoping that they’ll recover their losses in the next quarter (Jan 2010).

Obviously that isn’t happening….

Anyway, just what could this mean?

Just being pessimistic here, but since SJ’s sale is low, we might never see a classic SMT-style game again.

Inb4 9001 Persona 3/4 spinoffs/remakes.

Time will tell just how this change will actually affect us, the consumers.