With development budgets of games continuing to balloon at an alarming rate, publishers are growing increasingly more stringent with what projects they choose to greenlight. We have another example of that in the form of Bandai Namco, with the Japanese company revealing in its latest quarterly earnings report (as caught by IGN) that it has cancelled five unannounced projects that were in development.
As reported by Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki on Twitter, the company has attributed these cancellations to staggering impairment loss of 21 million yen incurred due to an underperforming game that hasn’t been named. The game in question, however, is likely free-to-play online action RPG Blue Protocol, which released in Japan last June, and is scheduled to release in the West sometime this year.
Reports last year claimed that Bandai Namco was working on mobile version of Blue Protocol in collaboration with Tencent. It remains to be seen whether the project is among the five that have been cancelled, especially in light of the game’s underperformance in Japan thus far.
Bandai Namco says it now has tighter rules in place when deciding which projects to greenlight, which, as you may have guessed, is down to rising development costs. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom for the company, with Tekken 8 having sold over 2 million units in less than three weeks, which, Bandai Namco says, is ““better than we’d hoped for at this point.”