Gree Gives Up on HTML5 as Sales Slide 17 Percent

Japanese gaming studio Gree said today that it would “pivot to a native game business structure” in the new fiscal year after revenue in fiscal 2014 slid from $1.49 billion to $1.23 billion. Profits fell 23 percent to $170 million. As Gamasutra explains, that “pivot” reflects the diminishing returns of HTML5 games, which dodge app store revenue splits but are even harder to discover on modern mobile devices (and that’s saying something). Gree recently hired a new COO, Andrew Sheppard — a big get, as Sheppard until recently oversaw the international studios at Kabam.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.