Namco Bandai Holdings is merging their game making talent into a single division. Starting on April 2, Bandai Namco Studio will handle franchises such as Soulcalibur, Tekken, Taiko no Tatsujin, Mobile Suit Gundam: Bonds on the Battlefield, and Tales series.
Employees from the closed Tales studio will move over to Bandai Namco Studio. Altogether, the studio will employ 1,000 people. Namco Bandai Games believes this will speed up development and increase efficiency while sparking creativity and improving the team’s skills.
Before the Namco Bandai merger, Bandai usually developed games by outsourcing work to other developers. CyberConnect2 handled Naruto games, Spike took care or Dragon Ball, and cavia worked on Ghost in the Shell. Namco, on the other hand, had a number of internal teams and studios working on games within the company. It’s similar to Square and Enix where Squaresoft had studios and Enix outsourced. The new Bandai Namco Games studio appears to be working on internal intellectual properties, according to the press release.
