Namco Bandai Shifting Development Focus Back To Japanese Studios

Namco Bandai President Shukuo Ishikawa said the company will be refocusing its game supervision efforts on Japanese studios after disappointing performance for some Western-developed titles. “We found the quality and development speed of titles made for us by the overseas studios to be lacking,” Ishikawa said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Foreign studios can still propose and develop games, but our Japanese staff will control the process more closely.” The decision mirrors a similar retrenchment towards local control signaled by Capcom earlier this year after disappointing sales performances for Western-developed titles Bionic Commando and Dark Void. Last year, Namco took back development duties on a Splatterhouse reboot from independent developer Bottlerocket, which subsequently closed. That title saw an eventual release just recently, and early reviews are middling. Namco recently reported a net loss of 1.93 billion yen ($24 million) for the first half of their fiscal year, with Japanese-developed Tekken 6 leading the company's shipments for the period. That report also revealed that Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, developed by Cambridge, England-based Ninja Theory, fell short of expectations in shipping only 800,000 units for the period. Last month, Namco laid off 90 U.S. employees in a reorganization focused on the online and mobile divisions. However, Namco Bandai is still focusing on the West as a final location for its titles -- as Bloomberg notes, the company, which gets 70 percent of its revenue in Japan, "wants to increase overseas sales to half of its total in the year ending March 31, 2016."