The staff count at Tekken 8 and Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco has fallen by over 100 in the last ten months, a new report has revealed.
According to Automaton Media, the Japanese online pension registry, which shows how many employees business have enrolled, shows a diminished number of staff in February when compared to April 2024.
Automaton says that the register showed Bandai Namco employed 1,294 people in April 2024, but that this number had fallen to 1,177 as of the last update, which took place on February 4th. That represents a drop of 117 people.
Bandai Namco doesn't seem to have publicly announced these layoffs, although recently, Unknown 9: Awakening developer Reflector Entertainment, a subsidiary of Bandai Namco, revealed it would lay off an unknown (no pun intended) number of staff.
As Automaton points out, a Bloomberg report in October alleged that Bandai Namco staff were essentially being coerced to leave the company voluntarily through the use of "oidashi beya", or "banishment rooms".
Employees were allegedly placed in these rooms with no real tasks to complete, effectively pressuring them into leaving the company and circumventing what Bloomberg calls "some of the world's strictest labor protection laws".
Bandai Namco itself denied those reports, and the reduction in headcount at the studio naturally doesn't provide any kind of evidence that oidashi beya were being used, but it does look like the studio underwent a fairly significant staff drop between April and February.
It's also worth noting that since this staff reduction hasn't been officially announced, it might not even technically be correct to call them "layoffs", since some staff may have left voluntarily or retired.
This report also comes after Bandai Namco released its financial statement for the nine-month period between April and December 2024, which shows growth in both profit and sales for the company.
That boost is, according to Bandai Namco, attributable in part to things like the "massive success" of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, as well as strong sales for both Elden Ring and its DLC Shadow of the Erdtree.
