According to former Level-5 Abby employee Matt Matoba, while there were multiple factors that led to Level-5 Abby shutting down, a major factor was mismanagement of the Yo-kai Watch series, specifically the decision to remove Nintendo as a producer of the series. Nintendo had requested a "large portion" of the series' profits in return for publishing the games and advertising them, but Level-5 broke off the partnership under the belief that the cut was too big. While Matoba couldn't recall the exact percentage of the cut, he argued any percentage would still have been worth it purely for Nintendo's advertising, which had more than doubled their userbase, concluding with "Any percent of something is better than 100% of nothing."