I sat down and wrote up a new blog post. First one in a while. This is looking at some news that happened in Japan the past couple of days.

Shinobism Gaming’s Team Activities are ceasing

On February 3rd, Shinobism Gaming announced that they would be ceasing activities for their eSports Team. On February 5th, Momochi released a video talking about the change.

Basically, Shinobism Kabushiki Kaishya is ceasing their eSports Team activities, but the company itself and their behind-the-scenes activities will continue. He didn’t detail what that means specifically. I know that they run events, like the Tokyo Offline / Tokyo Online Party events, and help others running events as well. I’m not sure of the status of Studio Sky, their website hasn’t been updated since 2017, but I think Shinobism still has the space and uses it for their streaming activities. I’m sure we will hear more from Momochi and ChocoBlanka (who does a crazy amount of work behind the scenes) around what they are doing with Shinobism.

Particularly, in the video, Momochi talks about:

• They’ve been doing gaming team activities for the past 5 years.
• If you include their work with Studio Sky and supporting younger players, it has been 9 years. It was founding November, 2015.
• Even though 90-100% of people know Shinobism just for the gaming team, they have Shinobism KK doing event activities, they have staff, and do other business activities. Just the team portion is ending.
• They will have a booth at the SFL JP Grand Finals on February 11th and you can see the team there. Team activities will continue until the end of February 2025.
• The company was doing well thanks to everyone’s support, it doesn’t sound like they are shutting things down because of major trouble, financial or otherwise. In the video he is trying to figure out what to talk about and how much to reveal. They did not just decide like, a day or two before the announcement.
• Momochi wanted to make it clear that as a big fan of The Pillows band, who also just a few days before announced that they were ceasing activities, he did not also decide to close his team. That’s just a coincidence. He said a lot of people were saying that, but it really is just a coincidence, and he was really shocked that they broke up.
• While he can see that people might be sad about the team ending, he’s looking forward to new things and new challenges. He’s looking forward towards the future and not back to the past. He thinks you should think of it in a positive light. He is sad a bit too though. Five years is a long time!
• Members of the team will be deciding for themselves what they will do. Some may retire, some may continue in eSports.
• He does not see this as an end. It probably won’t have a big impact on his activities as a player, and looks forward to people’s support.

SCARZ picks up Storm Kubo

On February 4th, Storm Kubo posted a YouTube video about joining SCARZ. It looks like SCARZ tweeted about him joining the team on February 2nd. It’s worth watching one of those videos, because it’s pretty funny. Storm Kubo has a fun YouTube channel, which well-edited videos between 10 and 20 minutes showing some fun aspect of a character. He’s got fun commentary while he plays, and I usually catch all his videos (at a bit of a delay in my Watch Later playlist).

The interesting thing is that he is joining SCARZ on their Content creation team, not as a pro gamer. He also said that he isn’t getting any kind of salary or money for joining. Instead, the reason he joined is because there are things that he wants to do that he isn’t able to do on his own, and by joining SCARZ he is able to those things. One of the things he wanted to do was make some merchandise, which he was able to do. He’s part of the team starting 2025-02-02.

He doesn’t say what else he wants to do, but SCARZ tweeted about Storm Kubo appearing at the 6th floor of Shibuya Parco on February 13th and 14th from 6pm – 8pm.

SCARZ primarily is a FPS team, but they did have a SFV team a while back. He says that this isn’t going to change what he does – stream, edit down to videos, and post those. He will add some new stuff around events and other projects with SCARZ support.

He also did a video a day or two ago of the Kotobukiya Official SF6 Pop-up Store in Akihabara, which will be open February 8 to February 24. This tweet has more information.

EVA:e team dissolution

On February 1st, Team EVA:e announced that they will cease gaming activities as of March 31st. Their press release says that the team was founded 2020-09-23. They took won the JAPAN eSPORTS GRAND PRIX eFootball, and got 4th in Rainbow Six Japan Championship 2020. They note that Hikaru got 5th in Esports World Cup 2024. They thank their fans and sponsors. They’re planning some sort of final event for the team in March 2025.

I don’t know much about the EVA:e team, I want to look into their history.

Interestingly, their promotion material says that EVA:e was formed as ambassadors for the EVANGELION e:PROJECT brand that has collaborations with different companies, like this stick by Answer (isn’t that a Hori TE2 body?) The website is a 404, but there are some MSI collaboration items at Tsukumo. The goal was to increase awareness of the brand.

The two companies that look to be involved behind the scenes are NGM KK, Kobe-based company that runs esports teams and events founded in 2019. They have 25,000,000 JPY in assets ($165,000 USD or so). The second company is Run’A Entertainment, founded in 2003 with about 10,000,000 JPY in assets ($66,000 USD). It looks like they have done a variety of racing team things, primarily with Evangelion Racing since 2010.

Evangelion was created by Gainax, which apparently went bankrupt in June 2024 (I did not know that! Who owns GunBuster now?) The rights are owned by Studio Khara, which was founded by Hideki Anno in May 2006. Looks like a rocky history there. My pure speculation is that things probably got tough financially for the team after June 2024, but I’m not enough of an investigative reporter to dig into whether Gainax had any relationship to the team. My guess is that the eSports team acts as advertising for the hardware focused EVANGELION e:Project group, which is perhaps an income stream for the Evangelion rights holder.

EVA:e Team History that stood out to me. Generally they are always doing stuff with Rainbow Siege 6, and have a variety of different FPS games going at any given time. I was surprised to see that they had a Street Fighter Fighting Games team since the beginning, and always had something going on with that. PUBG Mobile didn’t last long.

• 2020-08-23 Fighting game player Persia got 5th place in the Yoshimoto Gaming G-Tune Cup.
• 2020-10-16 They got a sponsorship with NTT’s Hyogo branch, Logicool,
• 2020-12 They picked up some FPS members.
• Through 2021 lots of Street Fighter V, Rainbow Siege 6 stuff. Some activities around collaboration product introductions.
• 2021-04-16 They took part in / helped build out an eSports facility in Kobe (eSPARKLe Kobe). Still around with the EVA branding.
• 2021-07-07 They started selling replica uniforms at the EVANGELION STORE.
• 2021-08-19 They won the Winning 11 Qualifier for Hyogo-ken.
• 2021-11-15 Started a VALORANT team.
• 2022-02-10 Announced the MSI x EVANGELION e:Project collaboration.
• 2022-06-01 Announced that [[https://eva-e.jp/news/1117/][they picked up a V-tuber]].
• 2022-11-01 Started a PUBG Mobile team.
• 2022-11-21 Won the MIRAGE Valorant Cup.
• 2023-02-08 Dissolved their PUBG Mobile team.
• 2023-05-12 Hikaru and Shouma joined the Fighting Games team.
• 2023-05-22 Hikaru won SPIRIT ZERO Cup for SFV.
• 2024-03-01 Shyuji and Wabichi joined the Fighting Games team.
• 2024-05-07 Shouma leaves the Fighting Games team.
• 2025-03-31 The team ceases activity.