Japanese game developer Imageepoch and affiliate company Smile Online Games have begun bankruptcy procedures in Tokyo this week following a stretch of declining sales. Research provider Teikoku Databank reports (via Siliconera) that Imageepoch has a debt of $9.2 million (1.1 billion yen) owed to 43 different creditors.
It came out near the end of the Nintendo DS life cycle, where gamers were already looking toward to its successor, the Nintendo 3DS. Its predecessor, Devil Survivor for the DS, won praise for its fresh new approach to strategy role-playing games, and it was successful enough to become a comic series.
When Atlus and Spike Chunsoft got together to mash up dungeon crawler franchises Etrian Odyssey and Mystery Dungeon, the companies cleverly combined the best aspects of each series to make a crossover so well done that it should become a new franchise on its own.