BLACK CLOVER Is Getting Its First Roblox Game — But WAKA Inc. Isn't a Stock You Can Buy

On September 10, during Roblox's Developer Conference in San Jose, a Tokyo company called WAKA Inc. stood up and announced that was getting its first official Roblox game. It is "in development," officially licensed, and described as a cooperative action experience. Next to it sat a sibling announcement: GINTAMA, another beloved Shueisha anime, was also getting its first official Roblox game.

Read the headline on its own — by WAKA Inc. — and it sounds like growth-company news, the kind where someone, somewhere, gets to invest in the studio behind the anime land rush on Roblox. The first question a careful reader asks is the obvious one: can you own WAKA Inc.?

The short answer is no, and the longer answer explains most of what this story is actually worth.

The company behind the headline is private — and tiny.

WAKA Inc. is not a listed company. It is a Tokyo startup founded in 2023 under the name EbuAction and led by a founder, Keita Noda, who was still a teenager when the funding round closed. In June 2026 it raised ¥250 million — roughly $1.58 million — in a round led by the Japanese venture fund Spiral Capital, with Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Samurai Incubate, United, and F Ventures, plus a roster of individual backers that includes former Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada.

That is an early-stage seed-scale raise, not a public offering. There is no WAKA ticker, no exchange listing, and no way for a U.S. retail account to buy it. Press releases at developer conferences do not paper over the capital structure; they describe who might eventually benefit from one.

What the business actually does

WAKA's pitch is a specific market view. On Roblox, unofficial, fan-made anime and gaming content sits at the top of the platform's revenue rankings. WAKA wants to fill the gap between that demand and the licensed supply, by signing official deals with Japanese rights holders and publishing the "real" versions. It runs two lines: branded entertainment games for clients like NTT Docomo and Asahi, and licensed anime content production.

That is a coherent strategy, and it is why the press release exists. But it also leans on two fragile things. First, it depends almost entirely on a single platform — Roblox's rules and economics can change beneath it. Second, securing official anime licenses in Japan is famously slow and complicated, and WAKA faces established unofficial creators who already hold the audience's attention. An announcement that a game is "in development" is pipeline marketing. It carries no revenue, no launch date, and no certainty of a hit.

The economics of the layer WAKA operates in are also harsher than the headline suggests. When a player spends a dollar inside a Roblox experience, the developer keeps roughly a quarter of it through the traditional exchange, rising to maybe 29–35% when engagement-based payouts are included. Roblox keeps most of the rest, owning hosting, moderation, discovery, and the audience. That is the deal every studio on the platform signs, and it caps how much money a licensed anime game can produce even if it succeeds.

The only liquid way to bet on this trend

So the investable object here is not the studio behind the license. For a U.S. retail investor, the only liquid way to express a view on "licensed anime IP reaching Roblox's hundreds of millions of players" is the platform itself — Roblox Corporation. And that is where the trend's cost shows up.

In its most recent reported quarter, Roblox grew revenue 36% year over year to about $1.5 billion. The metric the company itself calls its cash engine — bookings, the actual money users spend — grew only 8% to about $1.6 billion, at the low end of its own view, and management guided for a further slowdown. A platform can add licensed anime experiences and still decelerate on the number that pays for everything.

That is the boundary this whole story sits on. BLACK CLOVER and GINTAMA entering Roblox are real, licensed, brand-building steps within an anime land rush that is genuinely happening. But they are steps taken by a private, early-stage studio you cannot own, on a platform whose bookings are cooling while the excitement is hot. The instinct the headline invites — there's a company behind this, I should find the stock — is exactly the instinct that has nothing to buy.

If the theme matters to you, the honest question is not when WAKA's games launch. It is whether Roblox can turn licensed anime into reaccelerating bookings, because that is the only public stock in the sentence. A WAKA pipeline announcement changes nothing about that bar; it only makes the interest rate on your attention look like a growth signal.