Hervé Hoerdt, vice president of the Marketing and Digital division of Bandai Namco Europe, revealed that the company intends to “double” the size of its business by producing new IPs, providing more localizations, and working on multiple platforms.
“Japanese companies mostly develop on Nintendo and PlayStation,” Hoerdt noted in an interview with MCVUK. “But more and more we have the Xbox, especially for the UK market, and PC. We also want our fans to enjoy localized games, so we’re doing more games in languages like Polish, Russian and Arabic with more to come.”
“Last but not least, it’s about the IPs. Obviously, we think about the big anime IPs like One Piece, Naruto and Dragonball, but our Japanese content is only addressing a limited part of the market segment. We’ve also been working with studios in Europe and we’ve been going back to Japan saying, ‘Okay, these are the hottest ones and we’ll bring these new IPs to market over the next five years.’ That’s a pillar of our company, and we’re going to use it to double our business,” Hoerdt said.
“Our competitors are now doing fewer, bigger titles, which I understand from a PR perspective, but from a consumer perspective, video games have to be diverse, so we’ll be somewhere in the middle. We won’t go down the fewer, bigger road,” Hoerdt further stated.
As you may already know, Bandai Namco has collaborated with Dontnod (Life is Strange) for the development of a new title with a strong narrative style, but we still do not have more details about it.
