Bandai Namco employees are reportedly the latest victim of a that'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 from , 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 the dismissal
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.
This coincides with several cancelled projects for the company—, and the article also claims that "several games, including ones that feature characters from animes Naruto and One Piece, as well as a project commissioned by Nintendo" had their curtains called in a สล็อตฟรี similar fashion.
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 ทดลองเล่นสล็อตฟรี 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."
Such denials are to be expected, though—while expulsion rooms are still a problem in Japan, actually admitting you're using them is a no-go. , author of "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" John Szczepaniak refers to an incident in 2000-2001 wherein SEGA was successfully sued by employees for the practice:
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 ancient that confirms the incident, as well as this (machine-translated) confirming 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 absolutely has to.