4 Video Game Leaders Land On “Japan’s 40 Richest”

Forbes Magazine has revealed their list for Japan's 40 Richest people, with four notable names from the video game industry.

Starting from the bottom to the top, #39 Yasuhiro Fukushima (age 64) is the founder of Enix and the the largest shareholder of Square Enix. He currently has a net worth of $660 million, slightly down from two years ago, when Forbes ranked him #34 with an estimated net worth of $710 million.

Next is #25 Hajime Satomi (age 70), the current head of Sega Sammy after being the founder of pachinko maker Sammy. Not bad for someone who withdrew from Aoyama Gakuin University to build Sammy Corporation from the ground up. He is married with three children and has a net worth of $1.15 billion.

#11 Hiroshi Yamauchi (age 84), also married with three children, is the largest individual shareholder of Nintendo and has an estimated net worth of $2.7 billion. Unfortunately, this figure is more than half below his estimated worth of $6.4 billion by Forbes in 2008, a year when Nintendo's Wii and DS were near their peak of worldwide success. He was the third president of Nintendo before being succeeded by Satoru Iwata in 2002.

Not just the youngest on the list, #7 Yoshikazu Tanaka is the founder and CEO of GREE, which showed its wares at E3 not so long ago. Some of our Game Revolutionaries even went to one of their E3 parties. As a mobile gaming service, GREE boasts the largest online social network in Japan and hopes to expand its reach into China.

[Source]