Bandai Namco appears to have lost over 100 staff since April 2024, according to online records of the Japanese Pension service. These staff have departed without much fanfare, after a rough patch for the video game giant.
First discovered and reported by Amber V at Automaton Media, 117 developers have left the company – and as a result the people under Bandai Namco’s pension payroll scheme – in a mere 10 months. Which teams these staff belonged to, and the game’s they were working on, remain a mystery.
Bandai Namco have struggled in the video game department in some regard within that time. Blue Protocol, the company’s latest MMORPG release, was taken offline following a release that fell below expectations. This in turn cancelled the Western release of the game, which was to be published by Amazon. Some Blue Protocol developers split off the from the company have opted to keep the spirit of the game alive with Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a spiritual successor to the game being developed under Tencent subsidiary BOKURA, bringing a portion of the Blue Protocol team along for the ride.
Alongside the closure of Blue Protocol, Bandai Namco Online was dissolved and incorporated into Bandai Namco proper. Staff from Bandai Namco online, caught in this limbo between projects, may well have made up a sizable portion of these departures. However, given there are no official announcements or list of departing employees between now and April last year, no one knows for sure.
While one could intuit a negative outlook for the company based on this stat, looking at recent official financial reports for Bandai Namco paints a far different picture. In the February 5 report, the company announced significant growth in operating profit compared to the same time last year. This is linked to big releases like Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero which only recently passed 5 million copies sold. So it seems like company-wide, things are going well at least.
What do you think the cause of these departures are? Are you like me, attributing the loss to big misses like Blue Protocol, or can this be blamed on something else? Let us know below!
fbq('init', '1749355691872662');
fbq('track', 'PageView'); window.facebookPixelsDone = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event('BrockmanFacebookPixelsEnabled')); }
window.addEventListener('BrockmanTargetingCookiesAllowed', appendFacebookPixels);