With an estimated 20,000 layoffs and several studio closures over the past two years, the industry is looking for signs of growth — and Bandai Namco's Arnaud Muller is confident those signs will appear before the end of the year.
We caught up with the Japanese publisher's European CEO at Gamescom in Cologne, who said the company is in a solid position despite broader market conditions.
Bandai Namco reported record sales in its last financial year, and the first quarter of the current year got off to a great start thanks to the launch of the Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree. Muller added that the publisher wants to “maintain this momentum as long as possible” while the industry continues to face challenging times.
“I would call 2024 the year of stabilization,” he says GamesIndustry.biz. “The industry has gone from double-digit growth during the COVID years to much more difficult times and what I would call a market correction in 2022 and 2023. The market will grow again and hopefully the challenges facing the industry are behind us.
“We at Bandai Namco are no different. We look at the portfolio that we have for the next three to six years, up to 2030, and there are clearly a lot of opportunities for growth, whether they come from our own IPs or from our distribution partnerships.”
There appeared to be no correlation between record financial results and the decision to lay off staff, with a number of other publishers cutting hundreds of jobs despite positive numbers on their balance sheets.
Japanese publishers, including Bandai Namco, have generally managed to avoid layoffs — “definitely not something on the scale of the industry as a whole,” says Muller — a topic we covered last month.
When asked how Bandai Namco was able to weather the turbulence that other publishers were experiencing, the CEO attributed it to the diversity of the company's portfolio and other structural factors that make it “a very different company from some [its] peers.”
“We're not relying on one or two products and we're not just relying on the video game business,” he explains. “We have a lot of IP that we own and we work with licensors, which allows us to have some successes as well as some challenges.
“I think the reason we were less affected than some other publishers is because we didn't invest as much during those COVID years. We were very cautious with M&A, while some valuations were extremely high for some.” other publishers we were not like [excessive] at the time, so we weren't as affected as some of the other players. So it's relatively stable.”
We'll have the full interview with Muller in the coming weeks.