Bandai and Namco merging?

[Zeus]

Maybe. Shares suspended trading, so speculation is running wild.

From Magicbox:

Nihon Keizai reported that Bandai and Namco is considering to merge in Japan, to create Japan's 2nd biggest toy and video-game maker. Bandai's spokeswoman Akiko Taue said the company is currently in discussions with Namco regarding to the merge. Shares of Bandai and Namco were suspended from trading in Tokyo.

[Julius Seeker]

Bah! If Namco merged with Sega or Capcom, then that would be news.

[Don]

Does Bandai make any games we'd care about? I think they just make giant robot games.

[the Gray]

Combined Assets of roughly 1.74 Billion?

With developement costs of AAA games rising dramatically this will give Namco the ability to hire larger teams and produce truly superb games for the next-gen consoles.

But as long as it's not EA buying up another Studio, or getting another exclusive Sports license, I'm okay with it.

[Zeus]

Bandai is quite large in Japan, games are only a portion of what it does. It also makes anime shows, toys, and all that crap (they did the Wonderswan as well). It's actually a better opportunity for Namco as they can then start taking advantage of their properties across more forms of media, thereby dramatically increasing their returns on their investments

[Julius Seeker]

Well, I would certainly like to see Namco with better marketing deals on their games. I feel that they are not selling nearly as well as they should. Their RPG's do sell well for a non-Square/Enix organization, but they still never seem to break the million mark, and usually sell around 300-500K annually in the Japanese market. I do believe with better marketing, that Namco could easily take the lead from Square/Enix in the RPG department.

[Don]

The Tales aren't that good to be selling a million. Not that Enix/Square RPGs are all that great either.

[Julius Seeker]

I'm only speaking about the Japanese market by the way, mainly because there is no good sales data source for North American and European sales of games from Japanese third party companies.

[Zeus]

The Tales aren't that good to be selling a million. Not that Enix/Square RPGs are all that great either.

Symphonia sold around 300k on the 'Cube

[SineSwiper]

Excuse me, Seeker, but Square and Enix, the two biggest RPG developers on the planet, just merged and you think a merger from two companies that don't do much in the RPG dept is going to best them... in the RPG dept.? Granted, Namco is a huge name in fighting games, but don't make claims that are too far away from reality.

If Konami and Working Designs were planning to merge, you might have better ground to step on.

[Julius Seeker]

Tales of Symphonia has sold about 800K worldwide on gamecube. I can't find any PS2 figures, but it sold around 400K in Japan, so that would bring the total sales to 1.2 million.

http://www.dsgaming.co.uk/html/modules/ ... toryid=148

[Don]

I tend to think of Europe/Japan/NA as 3 separate markets and I don't really think of a worldwide market. When I say a million I mean a million in any of the 3 areas.

Anyway going big isn't going to be the answer against SQIX because you don't get bigger than SQIX when it comes to RPG. For anyone to seriously challenge SQIX in the RPG department you need either:

1. Come up with something so cool that I can't even tell you what it is. Seeing that no one has come up with anything that cool with RPG since the jump from 2D to 3D, good luck going that way.

2. Make a game that's actually pretty. Let us stop deluding ourselves into thinking gameplay or plot matters. You know both have sucked in RPG for a long time. If I'm going to buy a game that will eventually (or more like right away) have some same old boring story and the same old 4-command battle system I at least want to have assurance that I have something pretty to look at along the way. I can think of exactly 2 RPGs where the gameplay was so good that it may up for the rest of the game having no redeeming qualities whatsoever (Grandia 1+2) and 0 RPG where the plot made up for the lack of everything else.

And on the subject of plot, trying to play gotcha with the player seems to be the latest cliche in itself. It reminds me of how people talk about in Kindachi, a detective manga, the most reliable way to guess the murderer is to take the person who looks least likely to be the murderer (i.e. if they say something is impossible for X to do it, then it's probably X). And, like the Kindachi case, when all the game is trying to do is to one-up the player it's actually really easy to predict what's going to happen.

[Julius Seeker]

Adventure aspects and settings are also incredibly important in RPG's.


Anyways, yeah, the deal with Square and Enix at this point though is that Square games are not selling very well anymore, FFX-2 was their last game to sell over a million, and that was released years ago. In Japan, Final Fantasy 10 sold a little more than 2 million, which is down from FF9 which sold nearly three million; far down from FF7 which sold over 3 million and FF8 sold almost 4 million. Although Enix has had two games in the last year sell well. Dragon Warrior 8 sold over 3 million copies;

Nintendo and Enix with their Pokemon and Dragon Warrior series seems to always be able to sell their games in the millions despite what the graphics look like.