Bandai Namco quietly sheds 120 jobs in less than a year, new report suggests

Bandai Namco has reportedly shed over a hundred staff between April 2024 and February 2025.

As first reported by Automaton, the number of employees has dropped by 117 over that time when comparing the company’s own overview – which states it employed 1294 people – with public data taken from the Japan Pension Service, which now says it employs 1177 as at February 4, 2025.

The news follows reports that last October, the Tokyo-based company took a “traditionally Japanese approach to reducing staff by sending workers to rooms where they are given nothing to do, putting pressure on them to leave voluntarily”.

At the time, it was alleged 200 of its then 1300 employees have been moved into these “expulsion rooms” – or “oidashi beya” – and almost half of these have since voluntarily resigned.

At the end of November 2024, Bandai Namco Online was dissolved and merged with its parent company.

Bandai Namco called it an “absorption-type merger” that saw subsidiary Bandai Namco Online – which was established back in 2009 to drive Bandai’s online portfolio – shut down and its business transferred to Bandai Namco.