Bandai Namco is reportedly cutting its Japanese workforce and cancelling a number of projects due to lacklustre demand.
The news comes as the company reports huge sales of its latest anime game release Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Zero.
As Bloomberg has reported, staff are not being directly laid off. Instead, since April around 200 of the roughly 1300 staff at Bandai Namco Studios in Japan have been sent to rooms with nothing to do, putting pressure on them to leave voluntarily. Almost 100 people have resigned in this manner, according to Bloomberg sources.
These rooms are known as oidashi beya and are utilised due to strict labour laws in Japan. Many employees use these rooms to job hunt before leaving voluntarily.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Bandai Namco denied the use of these rooms.
“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,” said a representative from Bandai Namco. “There is no organisation like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”
Bandai Namco has overhauled its game lineup, resulting in 21 billion yen in writedowns (£107m) in the three quarters leading to December.
The likes of Japan-only MMORPG Blue Protocol was cancelled in August, ahead of its Amazon Games published worldwide release. Mobile game Tales of the Rays was also shut down in July in Japan.
Reportedly, several other projects have been cancelled or paused, including based on popular anime Naruto and One Piece, and a project commissioned by Nintendo.
The news follows the release of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero last week, also based on a popular anime, which sold more than 3m units in its first 24 hours on sale. On Steam it’s already reached a peak concurrent player count of over 122k players, with plenty more players across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.