As more developers and publishers become acquired, or are open to being acquired, Bandai Namco Europe COO Arnaud Muller touched on the difficulties of operating in this era of game development.
Speaking with GamesIndustry, Muller admitted that the Scarlet Nexus and Dragon Ball: The Breakers publisher has had to implement safeguards with third-party developers, specifically ones already owned by different publishers.
“Safeguards,” in this case, means securing relationships with the developers, discussing who ultimately owns the IP, and even possibly investing a minority stake into a studio.
The third-party studios that Bandai Namco works with, such as Dark Souls developer From Software, it very much wants to keep working with going forward. “We also have to keep in mind that we have to get some sort of security towards the future of the studio that develops this IP, if the IP doesn’t belong to us,” said Muller.
As an example, he pointed at developer Supermassive Games. Bandai Namco publishes the studio’s Dark Pictures anthology series, and Supermassive was purchased by Danish investment firm Nordisk back in July.
Even though Supermassive outright owns the Dark Pictures IP, Muller confirmed that the relationship between the developer and publisher hasn’t changed, Nordisk doesn’t publish games. In fact, Supermassive’s recent game, The Quarry, was published by 2K.
While admitting that Bandai Namco has the money to keep these relationships, Muller also briefly touched on the flip side of the acquisition glut. Namely, that not everyone can be a Bandai Namco.
“This spread of acquisition that we’re seeing is affecting some of the smaller publishers in their capacity to access the best studios in the world,” admitted Muller. But as far as what smaller publishers could do as the mergers and acquisitions continue, he had no answer.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that Blazblu was a Bandai Namco-published game. It has been updated to correct the error.