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19.02.2024 - 09:35 / gamingbolt.com / Bandai Namco
With development budgets of games continuing to balloon at an alarming rate, publishers are growing increasingly more stringent with what projects they choose to greenlight. We have another example of that in the form of Bandai Namco, with the Japanese company revealing in its latest quarterly earnings report (as caught by IGN) that it has cancelled five unannounced projects that were in development.
As reported by Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki on Twitter, the company has attributed these cancellations to a staggering impairment loss of 21 million yen incurred due to an underperforming game that hasn’t been named. The game in question, however, is likely free-to-play online action RPG Blue Protocol, which released in Japan last June, and is scheduled to release in the West sometime this year.
Reports last year claimed that Bandai Namco was working on a mobile version of Blue Protocol in collaboration with Tencent. It remains to be seen whether the project is among the five that have been cancelled, especially in light of the game’s underperformance in Japan thus far.
Bandai Namco says it now has tighter rules in place when deciding which projects to greenlight, which, as you may have guessed, is down to rising development costs. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom for the company, with Tekken 8 having sold over 2 million units in less than three weeks, which, Bandai Namco says, is ““better than we’d hoped for at this point.”
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Bandai Namco has announced a closed beta test for its new PvPvE extraction shooter Synduality Echo of Ada.
Publisher Bandai Namco and developer Gme Studio will host a closed beta test for SYNDUALITY: Echo of Ada from March 28 through April 1 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam, the companies announced. Registration is available here: North America / Europe / Japan.
Bandai Namco RPG Ray Gigant has been quietly delisted from Steam, with fans no longer able to purchase the dungeon-crawler originally developed by Experience. As one of the biggest third-party developers, Bandai Namco has released a wide variety of games, both featuring licensed games and original properties. The massive studio holds video game rights for several of the most popular anime series, including the Dragon Ball franchise, Naruto, and Digimon. Now, one of the publisher's lesser-known games has suddenly been removed from Steam, making it unavailable on modern platforms.
Publisher Bandai Namco and developer Dimps will release the fifth season of content for Dragon Ball: The Breakers on February 29, the companies announced. It will add Zamasu and Goku Black as a new double Raider tag team, among other content.
New trademarks from Bandai Namco hint at potential revivals for classic titles such as Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, and Splatterhouse. Bandai Namco may be taking cues from some of SEGA's upcoming reboots and remakes, as both companies have been renewing trademarks for a slew of classic IPs.
Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto was enlisted by Electronic Arts in 2021 to lead a new studio in Seattle and work on narrative-driven campaigns for the Battlefield series, and the following year, that studio was formally unveiled as Ridgeline Games, and confirmed to be in charge of “expanding the narrative, storytelling, and character development opportunities in the Battlefield series.”
Publisher Bandai Namco and developer Crafts & Meister will host a Japanese closed network test for the newly announced Gundam Breaker 4 on March 15 and 17 across PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Switch, the companies announced. It will be playable from 11:00 to 12:59, 16:00 to 17:59, and 21:00 to 22:59 JST each day. Users can apply to join the test via this link from now until March 4 at 23:59 JST.
Elden Ring, the acclaimed fantasy RPG from FromSoftware, has sold over 23 million copies since its release in 2022, Bandai Namco has confirmed. The publisher revealed the sales figure in wake of the gameplay trailer and release date reveal of the game's first major expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, on Wednesday. Exactly a year ago, Bandai Namco had announced that Elden Ring had sold 20 million copies worldwide.
FromSoftware’s Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree promises to explore the “dark secrets” of the world, shining more light on the mythos. However, director Hidetaka Miyazaki confirmed that its ending won’t change the base game’s progression of events (and vice versa).
As one of the best-reviewed games of all time and with more than 23 million copies shipped worldwide, Elden Ring has been an enormous success for developer FromSoftware, which means it’s only natural to assume that the studio isn’t going to be done with this IP anytime soon in the near future. However, according to FromSoftware boss and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki, currently, there are no plans in place for a second expansion following the June release of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, nor for a full-fledged sequel.
After more than a decade of wowing the industry with its gene-defining Soulslike games, last year, FromSoftware brought the Armored Core franchise back with Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. The mech action title received widespread acclaim from critics and audiences alike, but is the wait for the next game in the series going to be as long as it was for Armored Core 6? That much remains to be seen, but at the very least, the studio has every intention of making more games in the franchise.