The last couple of years have been brutal for the games industry, and Bandai Namco hasn’t been immune to hits. As per a report published by Bloomberg, the company is looking to grapple with “lackluster demand” by cutting jobs and cancelling in-development titles.
With Japan’s strict labour laws preventing mass layoffs, Bandai Namco is reported to be using “tradionally Japanese” methods to force employees to leave voluntarily. As per the report, this involves sending employees to “expulsion rooms”, or oidashi beya, where they are given nothing to do, and pressured to quickly find employment elsewhere, or else have their severance pay reduced due to their lack of productivity while in the expulsion room.
The report claims that Bandai Namco has sent roughly 200 employees to such rooms since April this year, of whom about 100 have left the company thus far, with more expected to follow in their footsteps in the months ahead.
That has come along with the cancellation of a number of projects. As per the report, several unannounced games have been cancelled, including those that featured the Naruto and One Piece IPs. A game that had been commissioned by Nintendo has also allegedly been shelved. In November last year, the Japanese company set up new internal team that would be focused primarily on working on Nintendo-commissioned projects.
“Our decisions to discontinue games are based on comprehensive assessments of the situation. Some employees may need to wait a certain amount of time before they are assigned their next project, but we do move forward with assignments as new projects emerge,” a Bandai Namco representative said. “There is no organization like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”
Bandai Namco recently announced that it would be discontinuing its failed MMORPG Blue Protocol, and that its planned Western release had also been cancelled.
Earlier this yar, the Japanese publisher confirmed that it had cancelled five unannounced titles after suffering impairment losses of 21 million yen due to an underperforming game. The game wasn’t explicitly mentioned, but was likely Blue Protocol.
The company has, however, also seen recent impressive success, with Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO having sold over 3 million units in its first 24 hours.