Square Enix offers 300 million yen for first place and 1 billion yen across 15 games. Only Japan residents can enter, of any nationality, and winners transfer half their copyright with no release guaranteed.
Yamaha releases VOCALOID7 on November 11, 2026, with an AI Megpoid based on Megumi Nakajima's voice. Vocaloid voices have come from real people. In an age of AI cloning, what is a voice with a known owner worth?
MARVEL | KADOKAWA plans a Shibuya-set Spider-Man manga for 2026, detailed the day Shueisha's 14 Marvel volumes left e-book stores. The story goes back to a 1978 giant robot.
1 million units on day one, 10 million for the series. Capcom's own sales list has the three PS2 Onimusha games at 1.52 to 2.10 million lifetime, and the habit of borrowing movie stars' faces goes back to 2001.
France announced three theme parks near Paris, €6 billion of Saudi money, and the region said one would be Dragon Ball. Toei Animation says it granted no license; Paris now says it never put that name forward.
Saint Seiya creator Masami Kurumada sued his ex-manager on September 2, 2026, over 4.686 billion yen (about $29.3 million) allegedly embezzled. A trusted editor walled him off for 25 years, his lawyers say.
A dissolution notice in Japan's Official Gazette wound up SNK Entertainment, the subsidiary once behind KOF and Metal Slug licensing. It handed that work to parent SNK in 2022. So why did an empty shell make headlines?
Navitas sued Renesas on August 10, 2026 over four US patents covering SuperGaN. The CEO who filed it once ran that business inside Renesas, which sued first over trade secrets and holds 39.9 percent of Wolfspeed.
KDDI's Buffmee and SoftBank's GaranAI launched in July 2026 on the same premise: use only licensed material, meter how much gets used, and pay publishers back. One sells to readers, the other to AI developers.