Gaming Industry200 Bandai Namco employees reportedly moved into ‘expulsion rooms’ designed to bore them into quitting, though the company maintains its innocenceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming Industry200 Bandai Namco employees reportedly moved into ‘expulsion rooms’ designed to bore them into quitting, though the company maintains its innocenceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: FromSoftware)
Bandai Namco employees are reportedly the latest victim of awildfire of videogame layoffsthat’ve scorched through the industry these past couple of years—although, owing to the unique nature of Japanese labour laws, the axe hasn’t fallen quickly.
According to a report fromBloomberg, approximately 200 out of 1,300 employees have been sent to “expulsion rooms”—also known as oidashi beya—an unsavoury practice that is nonetheless still apparently a problem in the industry. Rather than butting up against theextremely strictdismissal laws, practising companies will instead transfer their employees to rooms or floors that are designed to bore them out of their skull, or culturally shame them into accepting severance deals.
“Nearly 100 have resigned, said the people, asking not to be named discussing private information,” Bloomberg claims.
Bandai Namco, however, maintains its influence in the face of that claim: “Some employees may need to wait a certain amount of time before they are assigned their next project, but we do move forward with assignments as new projects emerge … There is no organisation like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”
The company has also denied claims from websiteLeakPress, which accuses the company of the practice, alongside other allegations such as “a sudden increase in waiting lists due to the large number of titles being discontinued” and “spreading bad rumors about employees whose departure has been confirmed to other companies”.
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“They didn’t just put people behind a partition, they sent them to a completely different floor. Sega didn’t just lose a lawsuit over this, their image was completely tarnished. Nobody wanted to buy games from a company like that.”
Though, as the talk points out, this didn’t quite make its way overseas—even the Wikipedia page for the company doesn’t make much of a hullabaloo about it. I was, however, able to find this ancientEurogamer articlethat confirms the incident, as well as this (machine-translated)article from GNN Newsconfirming the victory: “it went to court, and SEGA also issued an apology”. In other words, if Bandai Namco is in fact guilty of this practice, then it’s unlikely to admit it until it absolutelyhasto.
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