One of the industry's leading Japanese companies is making major cuts to both its project pipeline and its workforce. Bandai Namco, which just today we were talking about its positive results presentation with the release of Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero and its three million copies sold on the first day. The studio and publisher, which employs some 1,300 people in Japan, has reportedly cancelled or shelved an unspecified number of projects for consoles, PC and mobile and is pressuring some 200 employees to leave the company, according to Bloomberg. 100 of them are reported to have left the company at the time of writing.
This practice is typical of Japanese corporations, which have very strict dismissal laws in the country, and involves sending workers they intend to dismiss to empty rooms, called oidashi beya, or "expulsion rooms". In these places, workers have no assigned function within the company, and the vast majority choose to resign from their jobs. If they stay, the company itself may justify their poor performance to the government and dismiss them anyway, but without compensation.
In addition to these layoffs, Bandai Namco has cancelled several projects, adding to this year's closures of Blue Protocol or the mobile title Tales of the Rays. In addition, other unannounced titles from such well-known franchises as One Piece and Naruto appear to have been shelved or scrapped, as well as a project commissioned by Nintendo.
The reason, it seems, is due to the same tightening of resources that we've been seeing in the industry for the past two years after the explosion of profits and investment in the wake of the COVID 19 confinement and pandemic. The anonymous website LeakPress, which uncovered improper layoff practices among the company's workforce, reported the matter, but a Bandai Namco representative responded to Bloomberg that the data was "not entirely accurate".
Does it make sense for Bandai Namco to make such a big restructuring in the current context?