Namco Bandai Reports Net Loss For First Half Of 2010, Enslaved Falls Short

Japanese publisher Namco Bandai has reported a net loss of 1.93 billion yen ($24 million) for the first half of 2010. The figure is an improvement on its net loss of 6.04 billion ($74 million) for the same period last year. The reduction in net loss was thanks to an increase in company wide net sales of 173.60 billion yen ($2.13 billion). The firm's content division, responsible for its video game output as well as music and videos, reported 71.45 billion yen ($879 million) in sales, providing an operating loss of 2.6 billion yen ($32 million). Namco Bandai's best-selling video game title for the period was Tekken 6 with shipments of 1.07 million units in the U.S. Movie-based game Despicable Me shipped over 390,000 units, while its third best-seller, Dead to Rights: Retribution, shipped 350,000. Japan was the company's highest-grossing territory, with 9.8 million units of software shipped. The U.S. secured 7.3 million software shipments and Europe 3.8 million. In Japan, portable gaming accounted for two-thirds of Namco Bandai's unit software shipments with 2.04 million games for the Nintendo DS sold. PS3 followed with 1.83 million, followed by PSP with 1.2 million, Xbox 360 with 980,000 and Wii with 803,000. The company's financials follow reports last week that its U.S. office is to lay off 90 employees as part of a re-organization in which the company is combining its separate mobile and online game businesses into a single division. [UPDATE: In the Japanese version of Namco Bandai's earnings report [PDF], the publisher revealed that Ninja Theory's multiplatform game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West fell short of company forecasts of 1 million units shipped during the period with a reported 800,000 shipped [via Andriasang]. Also falling short of forecasts were Dead to Rights: Retribution, which missed projections of 700,000, shipping just 350,000, and Clash of the Titans, falling short of 700,000 units with 250,000 actual shipments.]