Atlus is (kind of) dead.

[toythatkills]

http://www.index-hd.com/press/?p=1002

Index Holdings, the current parent company of Atlus Japan, has decided to merge both Index (the mobile development division of Index Holdings) and Atlus (the Japanese game developer) into Index Holdings itself. Today they plan on having the meeting to approve the merger with the board of directors. The merger is planned to happen officially on 1st October 2010.

Basically what this means is that Atlus as a registered company will cease to exist, and it will be known in future as Index Holdings. It is currently unknown if they will keep the Atlus brand for use on games developed by the company, but technically nothing should change in terms of day-to-day business. The reasons given for the merger are to strengthen the overall management of the companies and to strengthen the value of the companies involved (by centralizing them into a single entity.

Let's hope someone like Kotick isn't running Index Holdings.

So, Atlus as a company no longer exists, but if they've any sense Index will go on releasing games under the Atlus name.

Don't know what this means for Atlus USA.

[nakamura]

Does this mean Persona 5 could be in trouble?

[briareos_kerensky]

The Atlus brand will continue to exist, reports Siliconera through Game Set Watch.
Hopefully the merge won't affect too much the developing teams.

[abigsmurf]

I'd doubt it very much they'd downsize them. P5 is very much in demand and they would've already sunk a fair bit of cash into it by now.

P3P had sold 200K copies by the end of november so has probably sold around 300K by now which is fairly respectable for a port. They made a profit of $4million last year which is pretty incredible considering the console situation was such a mess for niche developers (which is why so many posted a loss).

They've already got SMT: Strange Journey lined up for the 3DS as well as an unnamed SMT title.

To shutter Atlus and cancel these titles would be a huge mistake