Despite the huge success of Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, Bandai Namco is cutting staff and canceling several projects due to weaker demand, including a collaborative project with Nintendo. According to reports, the company is relocating employees and reconsidering future projects from April 2024.
Since the merger of Bandai and Namco in 2006, the company has become the owner of some of the biggest gaming franchises, including Tekken, Dark Souls and Ace Combat. Although recent titles like Tekken 8 and Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have seen huge success, Bandai Namco recently announced that their anime MMO Blue Protocol will not be released globally, and the Japanese servers will be shut down in January 2025.
The company is cutting costs and canceling projects everywhere. Recently, work on the mobile game Tales of the Rays was stopped, and the development of several games, including projects with characters from the popular series One Piece and Naruto, was also suspended. Also, a project that Bandai Namco was working on for Nintendo was stopped, although no details about the game were revealed.
Despite these problems, Bandai Namco is currently celebrating great success with Sparking Zero, the first new installment in the Budokai Tenkaichi series in 15 years. The game sold over three million copies in its first day and peaked at 122,554 concurrent players on Steam, showing that Bandai Namco still has a lot to offer.
Let's hope that the company will move in the right direction, so that the remaining games, such as Sparking Zero, do not receive an announcement about shutting down the server. Although it is a relatively small number of layoffs, such declines in the industry should always be taken seriously and considered before investing heavily in a franchise.
