Bandai Namco’s 2025 Merger Explained

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home November 23, 2024 2 Views 7 Min Read
Bandai Namco's 2025 Merger Explained

It has been a year of remarkable collaborations in the gaming industry, with Konami and FIFA most notably joining hands to host this year’s edition of the FIFAe World Cup. Recently, another announcement was made by Bandai Namco Holdings, one of the gaming industry’s biggest giants, about their future. It announced on November 20 that its two main subsidiaries in the gaming space, Bandai Namco Entertainment and Bandai Namco Online, will be merging on April 1, 2025.




While the former is generally in charge of publishing video games, the latter was created in 2012, tasked with creating online games, and is responsible for popular franchises like Gundam. This decision comes in response to the various challenges the subsidiaries faced this year as the company aims to streamline its operations.

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Bandai Namco’s Tough Year Birthed the Need for a Change of Operations

The 2024 calendar year has been anything but smooth sailing for Bandai Namco Entertainment, with the company getting caught in several controversies. Earlier in the year, Bandai Namco cancelled a slew of upcoming games, including high-profile projects with Nintendo, as well as letting go of a significant portion of its staff. This was followed by a report from Bloomberg that claimed Bandai Namco Entertainment was utilizing “oidashi beya” tactics to get its staff to resign instead of laying them off in a bid to avoid paying severance packages.


These tactics involve deploying targeted staff to unimportant work and excluding them from bigger activities, leaving them unproductive until they decide to leave the company. About 100 Bandai Namco staff are said to have resigned in this manner since April. Despite the controversy from Bloomberg’s brief, the success of Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero and Tekken 8 meant Bandai Namco Entertainment pulled through in a far more advantageous position than its sister subsidiary, Bandai Namco Online.

While Bandai Namco Entertainment is coming off the back of Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero‘s remarkable sales numbers of three million copies on its first day, Bandai Namco Online was recently forced to cancel the global release of its next big anime MMORPG Blue Protocol due to disappointing reception metrics in the Japanese market. The subsidiary had invested more than 8.2 billion yen (about $51 million) into the discarded IP, constituting a heavy loss on its books. The failed project is merely the latest in a worrying string of events, as something similar occurred in 2023 with Gundam Evolution.


Although the team shooter initially enjoyed a successful launch, it could not hold a consistent player base despite peaking at 57,000 concurrent players on Steam, leaving the publisher with few options but to shut down its servers. With Blue Protocol set to suffer the same fate in January 2025 and in the face of ending another fiscal year with losses, concerns have been raised about Bandai Namco Online’s viability to stand alone as an independent entity.

The Details Behind The Bandai Namco Merger

Bandai Namco Holdings, the parent company of the two giants, decided it would be best to employ an absorption-type merger. This means that Bandai Namco Online will be dissolved, and its liabilities, customer contracts, and assets, including existing intellectual properties, will be transferred to Bandai Namco Entertainment. According to the announcement by Bandai Namco Holdings on their official website, the purpose of the merger is to “respond to the recent changes in the game business environment and to strengthen the overall structure of the digital business sector.


The parent company has also expressed confidence that this consolidation will allow it to continue delivering high-quality games that meet fan expectations and that Bandai Namco Entertainment will do a great job managing titles like Gundam Tribe, SD Gundam Operations, and Idolish7 once the merger takes place in 2025. Hopefully it can meet these expectations.

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