Oasis cites Re:Zero mobile flop in push to oust KADOKAWA CEO

Oasis Management is leaning hard on Re:Zero's mobile record as evidence that KADOKAWA's leadership has not turned a marquee anime IP into a durable business. The activist fund, which says it owns about 13.76% of KADOKAWA, launched its “A Better KADOKAWA” campaign on May 20, 2026 and is pressing shareholders to vote against reappointing CEO Takeshi Natsuno at the June 24 AGM.

The argument lands because the franchise has now failed twice on mobile. KADOKAWA's own Re:Zero Witch's Re:surrection launched on August 26, 2024 as a 10th-anniversary title, then was scheduled for shutdown on May 30, 2025, after about nine months in service. The company said paid premium currency sales would stop immediately and that players with unused paid currency could request refunds, with the app needing to stay installed until refund processing finished. Before that, Sega's Re:Zero Lost in Memories went live on September 9, 2020 and ended service on May 12, 2023, lasting about 2 years and 8 months.

Taken together, the two closures show the same problem from different operators: the brand brings attention, but attention has not translated into staying power. In mobile, licensed anime games live or die on retention, event cadence, and monetization that feels worth the grind. Re:Zero has the fandom, but its two major adaptations still could not hold that audience long enough to build a lasting live service.

Oasis is folding that product record into a broader attack on KADOKAWA's direction. In its campaign, the fund said KADOKAWA's basic EPS fell from 77.42 yen in FY21/3 to 8.71 yen in FY26/3, while ROE dropped from 8.2% to 0.5%. It also pointed to guidance cuts in November 2025, arguing that the company's performance has deteriorated under Natsuno. In a separate shareholder filing summarized by Japanese media, Oasis said KADOKAWA had leaned too far into a “quantity over quality” IP strategy, failed to fully leverage FromSoftware, and carried governance baggage from the 2024 cyberattack and a JFTC subcontracting warning.

KADOKAWA's board pushed back on May 14, 2026, saying it opposed the proposal to remove Natsuno and that replacing him would be inappropriate. The company has also pointed to its wider business base, with FY2025 consolidated results of 277.915 billion yen in net sales, 16.651 billion yen in operating profit, and 53.87 yen in basic EPS for the year ended March 31, 2025. Even so, the Re:Zero double flop is the kind of evidence activists love to wield, because it shows how fast a famous IP can be burned through when mobile execution cannot match the demand sitting underneath it.