Bandai Namco is among the latest studios to suffer from layoffs, reportedly letting go 117 of its 1,294 employees. According to Japan’s Pension Service, an online database that tracks the number of insured employees at each business, these layoffs occurred between April 2024 and February 2025. This follows a Bloomberg report from October 2024 that alleged Bandai Namco had used oidashi beya (“expulsion rooms”) to coerce some 200 employees into voluntarily resigning. If even the studio behind games like Tekken 8 and Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is bleeding employees, 2025 may be another rough year for the industry.
Bandai Namco Expulsion Room Allegations
Though news of Bandai Namco layoffs has circulated for months, it took a while for more leaks and reports to surface. The critical and commercial success of Tekken 8 hasn’t kept the company from reducing staff. Because of Japan’s relatively strict pro-labor laws, however, it’s often easier for companies to place employees in expulsion rooms until they resign. Forced to sit in a room with nothing to do, employees often find resignation preferable to the monotony. Bandai Namco, for its part, has denied the expulsion room allegations, according to Bloomberg.
A post about the controversy by Reddit user @Zhukov-74 garnered hundreds of upvotes and many comments condemning the layoffs as well as the alleged use of oidashi beya. As one commenter put it,
The fact they don’t directly lay people off and instead put them in a room with nothing to do and basically bore them out of a job is so strange to me ffs […] It honestly seems worse cause mentally it must really mess you up.
Success stories like Sparking Zero and Elden Ring weren’t enough to stop the studio from canceling various projects. Now the fate of many Bandai employees, as well as games, seems to hang in the balance. For now, not even a suplex from King can keep layoffs down.
