CELSYS
3663
セルシス
Company Information
CELSYS provides web services and applications to help creators in production and publishing. The company offers clip studio paint, a painting and drawing application; DC3, a Web3 infrastructure solution; and Clip Studio Reader, an e-book viewer
Clip Studio Paint has successfully carved out a niche for being the best design software for creating manga and that style of artwork, with many tools and functions specific to that style which other design software ignores. Many professional manga authors use it, and they claim that it has the highest sales numbers for iPad design software.
Stock Perks
Categories: Memberships
Rights day
End of June, end of December
Details
License to use Clip Studio Paint EX. It's the premium subscription version of the software that usually costs 7,800 yen for a year (or 980 yen a month). You can buy a version on the computer for 23,000 yen, but the subscription version is the only one to get regular and exclusive updates, and you can use it on mobile phones and tablets.
There's also a version called Clip Studio Paint Pro which is 2,800 yen a year. The EX version seems to have more tools for animators and multi-page illustrations. You can see the full list of differences here. The software has full English support.
Requirements
200 shares gets you a 6 month voucher which you use for a single device. Since the rights date is every 6 months, you can continue to use the service as long as you keep holding onto the stock.
Comment
I'm not exactly a talented artist and I don't understand how to use most of the features or what they even do, but playing around with the software can be fun. There are a lot of tools that are specific to manga creation, and lots of user-made materials which you can download for free to enhance your drawings. The program has a lot of tutorials to teach you all that, and a community of users who seem to be pretty helpful if you do have questions or issues.
You only get one device with this license, I chose the iPad version and it has full Apple Pencil support, along with a 'simple mode' which is easier to get started with until you're comfortable enough to use the more advanced features. Compared to something like Procreate it's definitely much more focused on creating manga easily, and I feel like if I actually did spend time with all of the tutorials I might actually be able to make something interesting!
If you like creating manga-style art then you'll probably really enjoy being able to use the best version of it without having to buy a license.
Chart
Their shift to locking features and updates to the subscription model seems to have rejuvinated their share price.