Bandai Namco: "2024 will be the year of stabilisation"

With an estimated 20,000 layoffs and multiple studio closures during the last two years, the industry is seeking signs of growth — and Bandai Namco's Arnaud Muller is confident that those signs will appear by 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 the wider market conditions.

Bandai Namco reported record sales for its latest financial year, and the first quarter of its current year is off to a great start thanks to the launch of Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree. Muller added that the publisher wants to "sustain that momentum as long as we can," while the industry continues to face challenging times.

"I would call 2024 the year of stabilisation," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "The industry has gone from double digit growth during the COVID years to some far more difficult times and what I would call a market correction in 2022 and 2023. The market is going to grow again and the challenges that we face an industry, hopefully they're behind us.

"We at Bandai Namco are no different. We're looking at the portfolio we have for the next three to six years, all the way to 2030, and there is obviously a lot of opportunities for growth, whether that's coming from our own IPs or from our distribution partnerships."

There seems to be no correlation between record financial results and the decision to lay off staff, with multiple other publishers cutting hundreds of jobs despite the positive figues shown on their sheets.

Japanese publishers, including Bandai Namco, have generally managed to avoid layoffs — "certainly not something on the scale that the industry has experienced as a whole," Muller says — which is a topic we explored last month.

When asked how Bandai Namco has managed to weather the turbulence felt by other publishers, the CEO attributed it to the diversity of the company's portfolio, and other structural factors that make it "a very different company to some of [its] peers."

"We don't rely on one or two products, and we don't rely only on the video games business," he explains. "We have a lot of IPs we own and we partner with licensors which enables us to have successes and some challenges as well.

"I think the reason we have been less affected than some of the other publishers is we didn't invest as much during those COVID years. We've been very prudent in M&A deals, whereas some of the valuations have been extremely high for some other publishers. We weren't as [excessive] at the time, and therefore we weren't as affected as some of the other players. So it's relatively stable."

We'll have our full interview from Muller in the coming weeks.