It’s bad news for anime game fans as Bandai Namco is reportedly cutting its workforce after canceling several game projects, including some contract work for Nintendo. The company appears to be encouraging employees to resign rather than making redundancies, which is a common Japanese business tactic.
According to Bloomberg, Bandai Namco has canceled a range of projects, including new One Piece games and Naruto games, and is “taking a traditionally Japanese approach to reducing staff and sending workers to rooms where they are given nothing to do, putting pressure on them to leave voluntarily.” So far, the company has moved over 200 workers to ‘oidashi beya’ or ‘expulsion rooms,’ leading to nearly 100 resignations.
While Bloomberg’s information comes from insider sources linked to an anonymous leak website, an official Bandai Namco representative told the outlet, “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… There is no organization like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”
These sudden cancelations have come as a shock, especially given that the studio’s most recent release, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, sold over three million copies in its first 24 hours. However, the cuts mostly relate to mobile and online games like Tales of the Rays and Blue Protocol, so we’re likely to continue seeing Bandai Namco titles on the Nintendo Switch in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfbu3CJS0uY
That’s everything we know about Bandai Namco’s recent cuts. While we wait for a new Dragon Ball game on Switch, why not check out our Dragon Ball Legends tier list? You can also find out what we know about Dragon Ball Project Multi.