Last month, the legendary co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog was arrested for allegedly purchasing shares in a
Dragon Quest development studio before their announcement. A month later, he was arrested a second time for reportedly buying stock in a
Final Fantasy company in a similar fashion. Yesterday, Tokyo prosecutors formally charged Yuji Naka for inside trading roughly $US1,080,000 ($1,499,256) in
Final Fantasy stock.
According to
NHK, the two had been making a profit on insider trading (Thanks,
VGC). For the uninitiated, insider trading is when someone with non-public knowledge of a company is able to use that information to trade stock at an advantage. Doing so is
illegal in Japan. So Naka ran afoul of the law when he
purchased shares in ATeam before the studio had announced that they would be developing the mobile game
Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, a battle royale that was exclusively released for mobile devicesThough the game was announced in 2021, Naka was arrested on December 7.
This was a month after he had been
arrested the first time for buying shares in Aiming, the studio that created
Dragon Quest Tact. In both of these incidents, he was arrested alongside Square Enix employee Taisuke Sasaki. Sasaki was indicted for trading roughly $US782,000 ($1,085,572) in stock.
If the two had made a profit off the ATeam stock, it was presumably before
The First Soldier had been
cancelled less than a year after its launch. Square Enix had clearly been hoping to capitalise on the popularity of
Fortnite. Instead,
First Soldier suffered severe performance issues and was exclusively available on mobile.
Naka had
joined Square Enix in 2018 to direct
Balan Wonderworld, a strange action-platformer that was near-universally
panned as a flop. The game was unfocused and confusing to many reviewers, and Kotaku included it on
a list of the year’s biggest gaming disappointments. The director
departed Square Enix in June 2021. Maybe Naka would have been better off if he had been focused on directing a good game instead of manipulating the stock market.
The post Sonic Co-Creator Charged With Illegally Trading Over $US1 ($1) Million In Final Fantasy Stock appeared first on Kotaku Australia.
