Catherine has done rather well for Atlus and parent company, Index Holdings. At launch, the game beat their sales target of 150,000 units in Japan, and as of the end of February, the game had sold 250,000 units, according to a report at Keitai Watch. The increased goal for the game is now 300,000.
At a recent financial briefing, Yoshimi Ogawa, president and CEO of Index Holdings, stated that Catherine is now a new property, alongside Shin Megami Tensei and Etrian Odyssey, and that Index have various plans for Catherine’s expansion in the media business going forward.
We have one example of this to share already; Kadokawa are publishing a Catherine novel in Japan next month. Persona 4 is getting its own anime series, so I suppose it isn’t inconceivable that the same could happen to Catherine, too. Ports to handheld systems are another possibility, given that not everyone has the privacy to play a game like Catherine on a television set.
As we reported previously, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Hunter, a mobile phone game on the GREE mobile platform, also performed favourably. Throughout 2011, Index plan to aggressively pursue the social games market on both mobiles and smart phones.
