According to a report from Automaton, publisher and developer Bandai Namco has laid off more than 100 developers between April 2024 and February 2025.
As Automaton spotted, Bandai’s employee numbers in Japan dropped from 1294 to 1177, representing a drop in 117 people.
Bandai hasn’t made it directly clear, but these cuts seem to be a follow-up from reports that came out in October 2024, which stated that Bandai had cancelled multiple projects and were pressuring staff to leave by giving them nothing to do, and sending them to empty desks hoping employees would choose to quit instead of remaining in a limbo state.
This practice of giving developers nothing to do in an effort to pressure them to leave is known as “oidashi beya,” though at the time of the October 2024 reports, Bandai denied that it was engaging in such a practice.
At the time Bandai stated that “Some employees may need to wait a certain amount of time before they are assigned their next project.”
Source – [Automaton]