Bandai: Next-Gen Development Costs To Double

In an interview conducted by Japanese news agency Bloomberg, Bandai managing director Shin Unozawa has said that he expects development costs to double in the next generation of games consoles. Unozawa, who has worked on a number of Digimon titles for Bandai, estimates that the development of a new title will increase to ¥1 billion ($9.0m), from between ¥100 million ($0.9m) and ¥500 million ($4.5m) in the current generation. "Costs will begin to fall a year or so after the consoles are released and game makers become used to the systems," said Unozawa. These cited figures may, however, seem relatively low for some major Western developers, since some current-gen games already cost significantly more than the Bandai MD's upper limit. Nonetheless, speaking at the Tokyo Game Show, Unozawa added that Bandai aims to cut its software development costs by around 20 percent, thanks to its proposed merger with Namco. Although no formal statement has been made, both Bandai and Namco appear to have settled on the name “Bandai Namco” for the soon to be merged super-company, with a joint logo being prominently displayed at the Tokyo Game Show, where the companies also shared exhibition space for the first time.