After 24 years at Capcom, Yoshinori Ono is now president and representative director of Delightworks. He made the announcement on Twitter, and made the move to Delightworks on May 1. Along with working in a different studio, Ono will also be coming face to face with a new perspective of game development.
Delightworks is a Japanese mobile gaming company that is best known for the gacha mobile game Fate/Grand Order, where players summon the spirits of heroes of myth, legend, and history in order to save the world, taking them across time and space in an epic adventure from the creators of the Fate anime franchise.
Ono got his start at Capcom in 1996 as a sound engineer, and over the years worked his way up the ladder to become the head of Capcom’s consumer games development division. He was also the executive producer of the Street Fighter series and deputy head of Capcom’s esports business division.
There’s no telling exactly why Yoshinori Ono is working at Delightworks now, but if he does the same thing to the studio that he did to Capcom, hopefully it will mean good things for the future. While Fate/Grand Order is extremely successful as a game, perhaps Ono was called upon to help the studio advance its portfolio beyond mobile gaming.
It could also be that Ono has been tapped by Delightworks to help fix up the studio if it’s been having issues, though there’s no indication of exactly why Ono was picked to helm the studio to begin with. Whether Delightworks intends to develop more gacha games or expand beyond that remains to be seen as well.
Considering Yoshinori Ono has experience with Street Fighter, we might even be seeing a Street Fighter gacha game at some point. But we’ll just have to wait and see exactly what the studio does next.
