Bandai Namco Online in state of insolvency due to 8.2 billion yen loss and negative net income
Bandai Namco Online has reported a net loss of 8.201 billion yen (over 51 million dollars) in the fiscal year ending March 2024. Due to its growing negative net income, the company has become insolvent (source: GameBiz). Insolvency refers to a temporary state of financial distress and is not equal to or indicative of bankruptcy.
Bandai Namco Online is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bandai Namco Games specialized in developing and managing online games. Titles currently run by the company include Blue Protocol, IDOLiSH7, Gundam Tribe, Gundam Evolution and SD Gundam Operation. The free-to-play MMORPG Blue Protocol was the only new title to be released in the past fiscal year, and its underperformance has resulted in significant financial losses for the company (which Bandai HD has previously addressed).
This has contributed to Bandai Namco Online reporting a negative net income and total loss of 8.201 billion in fiscal year 2023. Furthermore, the company was in the red in the previous year too, reporting a net loss of 3.98 billion yen. The growing deficit margin has led to the company becoming insolvent. The graph below (by GameBiz) puts into perspective the scale of Bandai Namco Online’s losses in the past two years.
An industry professional has commented that the kind of losses we are seeing with Bandai Namco Online are likely a case of the developers inflating development costs by making, scrapping and remaking large-scale projects to improve them – which subsequent sales are not able to make up for.
On the other hand, Bandai Namco Holdings (which owns Bandai Games and Bandai Online) reported its highest net sales and net profit to date in fiscal year 2023, but this profit was propped up by its Toy and Hobby sector and Amusement sector.
Update: Added clarification regarding the term “insolvency” (July 3, 2024 6:45 PM JST)
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Blue Protocol was one game I was looking forward to playing but sadly they censored it by removing Physic Shakes and made censorship on fanservice outfits to make them “less revealing”. They took an extra year just to remove these features and it failed in America to cater to an audience that does not play these games instead of those that do and are similar to Japanese audiences who desire such works.
https://blue-protocol-db.com/news/exclusive-interview-franchise-lead-mike-zadorojny-blue-protocol-hands-on-demo/
Here is an interview in which talks about it. It is funny how they allowed Casino gambling which is worse for children but did not allow fanservice mechanics. The disconnect between Japan and the West is very much the reason why Bandai Namco Online is a huge failure and other games are not successful and the result will end up the same.
There is a term in Marketing to know your audience but Bandai Namco and many others just seem out of touch at the executive level causing huge losses in money with no real ROI on any of them. Something needs to be done to prevent such horrific spending and bad decisions that misread their own audiences and allow it to fail.
Can you even blame the game’s failure on censorship when the censored version never even came out in the first place? The game failed in its own home market because of its own shortcomings as an MMO and preserving the Type-S player character body in the overseas release isn’t going to be the thing that saves it.
I sank a considerable amount of time into the game and while I enjoyed it, I can also say the gameplay loop was average at best, which is nowhere near good enough in an environment where you have to compete against other anime-styled live service powerhouses like FFXIV and Genshin.
I was incredibly excited for Blue Protocol, but the censorship has removed my interest in the game. It’s not that I’d even use revealing outfits, or even enjoy looking at them, but I don’t like to spend long hours in a game when I know I’m playing a censored version of it that other countries are allowed to experience in full. It’s far too easy to say no censorship now.
The article says “Titles currently run by the company include Blue Protocol, IDOLiSH7, Gundam Tribe, Gundam Evolution and SD Gundam Operation.” Gundam Evolution is not currently ran by the company. That game shut down late last year.
@Azu
Censorship does not help sells in the first place, because it’s taking aspects that are integral to advertising and gameplay to help sell people on the game that would have helped in Japan and Overseas. It can have a base if Censorship does not exist, but when you censor something the global niche audience base you would have had goes out the window because they are getting a worse and inferior version of the game that only a single country or region has. Gameplay is important, but feature parity is far more important than anything else, and it loses soulistic elements of the original in the process.
Also nobody ever thought Blue Protocol would compete with FFXIV, but it would have a good niche sized audience that can help make good with feedback and consistent revenue to help keep it alive. But it did not because of the lack of feature parity and excuses with “Uncomfortably”. Japanese companies will keep failing until they figure it out.