CRI Middleware, the Tokyo company behind the CRIWARE audio and video middleware used in many Japanese games, fell short of its own plan for the year to September 2026, it reported on 5 November. Revenue rose 4.2% to ¥3.59 billion while operating profit fell 16.1% to ¥464 million, according to its earnings summary. The supplementary results deck puts those figures at 91.9% and 77.5% of the year’s targets and blames slow sales of new game products and a delayed push into Europe and the Americas.
The game segment still grew, with revenue up 7% to ¥1.93 billion and segment profit up 17.4%, gamebiz reports. Domestic middleware licensing rose 8.9% to ¥1.22 billion on console demand and several bulk licensing deals with Japanese customers. Overseas middleware and tool sales slipped 1.6% to ¥229 million: Greater China grew, but the deck says winning new customers in Europe and the Americas went slower than planned. Sound-production subsidiary Two Five grew 6.7% to ¥483 million on large voice-recording jobs from China, while sales of CRI TeleXus, the company’s online communication middleware, have not picked up.
For the year to September 2027, CRI forecasts revenue of ¥4.13 billion and operating profit of ¥600 million, the same profit figure it missed this year. It expects overseas game sales to rise 65.6% to ¥380 million by doing more work with large Chinese customers, winning mini-game projects and starting sales in Europe and the US using leads and trial environments it has already built. The annual dividend rises from ¥25 to ¥27, Fisco’s summary notes.
The company began in 1983 as CSK Research Institute, made games for Sega’s Saturn and Dreamcast, and launched the CRIWARE brand in 2006, according to Wikipedia. Its own figures put CRIWARE in about 30% of the top 300 console titles sold in Japan in 2025 and 37% of the top 100 smartphone apps. When it confirmed Switch 2 support for all its game middleware in April 2025, CRI said more than 800 titles on Nintendo hardware had used CRIWARE since the GameCube, GameBusiness reported. Its newest tool, CRI LipSync Alive, generates mouth movement from audio; the deck says it halved that animation work for a Project Sekai virtual concert on 26 October.