They often work with CyDesignation, a company formed by several former Square Enix artists in 2012, for producing artwork for their games. In 2016, they founded Cygames Pictures, an in-house animation studio to produce original anime and adaptations of their mobile game IPs. Further branching out into non-game media includes Cycomi to handle all manga published in print and on the web, and Cymusic to handle music production and selling.
Games developed or in development by Cygames:
- Rage of Bahamut, 2011 for Japan/2012 for the West; the English version was shut down in 2016.
- THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls, 2011
- Knights of Glory, 2013, shut down in 2016
- Dragon Quest Monsters: Super Light, 2014
- Granblue Fantasy, 2014; though an English language option was added to the game client in 2016, it is "officially" not available in any country besides Japan (though it also has no IP limitations and players the world over can access it via any computing device equipped with a Chrome browser).
- Granblue Fantasy Relink, TBA (A console Action RPG for PS4, previously co-developed with PlatinumGames)
- Granblue Fantasy Versus, 2019 (A console Fighting Game for PS4 co-developed with Arc System Works)
- Battle Champs, 2015
- The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage, 2015
- Princess Connect, 2015
- Shadowverse, 2015
- Princess Connect! Re:Dive, 2018; A reboot of Princess Connect
- Zone of The Enders: The 2nd Runner M∀RS, 2018 (Co-developed with Konami)
- Uma Musume, TBA
- Dragalia Lost, September 2018, a mobile Action RPG co-developed in tandem with Nintendo and first game to have a simultaneous release in Japan and the US.
- Lost Order, TBA (A collaboration with PlatinumGames)
- Project Awakening, TBA (The company's first original, internally-developed console game, an Action RPG for PS4)
Tropes employed by Cygames include:
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Their mobile games are all free-to-play but often lock desirables behind a randomly-determined gacha. Thankfully aside from spending money you can acquire in-game rewards and Play Every Day to obtain the necessary currency for the gacha (and Granblue Fantasy, in particular, has become rather famous for its generosity during major seasonal and milestone events and for having a much kinder "safety net" in the Cerulean Spark system for obtaining specific characters compared to much of its competition). Still, Random Drop is in full effect for most of them.
- DVD Bonus Content: A marketing strategy of Cygames, wherein redeemable item codes for rare in-game items in Granblue Fantasy are bundled with the DVD/Blu-Ray discs of their games' anime adaptations such as Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and Uma Musume. Of course, the Granblue anime is no exception.
- Reused Character Design: They've been pretty much porting everyone from Rage of Bahamut into Granblue Fantasy and Shadowverse, though recontextualizing their characters for the new games they appear in. Dragalia Lost gets similar treatment for a few characters (though in this case the recontextualization is often significant, such as turning Jeanne d'Arc into a humanoid dragon).
- Series Mascot: Bahamut the dragon specifically represents Cygames as a whole, it being part of the company's logo.
- Their versions of Lucifer and Bahamut from Rage of Bahamut will pop up in pretty much every original IP they develop. To a lesser extent, Albert the Thunderswift Lord, Anne of Mysteria and Grea the Dragonbornnote also tend to crop up in games pretty regularly, as does Cygames' version of Jeanne d'Arc (voiced by Megumi Han) and their version of Cerberus.
- In a broader sense for marketing as a company, the protagonists of each IP (Favaro, Amira, Kaiser, Nina to represent both Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and the game it's adapting, Lyria, Vyrn, and Gran/Djeeta for Granblue Fantasy, Pecorine for Princess Connect, Special Week for Uma Musume, Euden/the Prince for Dragalia Lost, and Arisa for Shadowverse) are used to market the company as a whole and for each individual property.
- Spiritual Successor: Several of their games are built upon succeeding a previous game.
- Shadowverse was primarily designed as a response to the failure of Rage of Bahamut in the west, by reusing the card game format in a package that would receive a better response globally (that is to say, one that was a bit closer in rules and play style to Magic: The Gathering-style card games, and most specifically Hearthstone).
- Dragalia Lost is one to Knights of Glory, reviving the concept of summoning and transforming into dragons in an Action RPG package (KoG having been somewhere between a strategy RPG ala Final Fantasy Tactics and a traditional RPG like a numbered FF), along with bringing the KoG job classes into Dragalia Lost as their own distinct characters to boot.
- Widget Series: A number of their games have been smash hits in Japan, and their Anime-styled gacha nature has tradtionally been a lot more welcomed there, while most Americans and Europeans have tended to bounce off their games, especially since mobile gacha in general has taken a lot longer to catch on outside of Asia. They began to make serious efforts to break into the Anglophone market in particular starting in 2015, though, such as releasing Shadowverse on Steam, releasing dubbed anime adaptations, or collaborating with other widely recognized companies like Nintendo.
