Bandai Namco Partly Dropping Arcade Business in North America

Bandai Namco announced today with a press release that it is withdrawing from the the amusement facilities business in North America.

Basically, the company is dropping its North American arcades under Namco USA, since their performance has been impacted heavily by the COVID-19 pandemic and the expectation is that the difficult situation will continue.

As a consequence, Bandai Namco is also reporting reporting an extraordinary losses (which incidentally means it’s a “one-time” loss in financial terms) of approximately 13.0 billion yen as business structural reform costs.

The company will sell the businesses and related fixed assets of 34 directly owned stores, one large directly owned store, and 760 revenue-shared locations to three external companies in the same line of business.

That being said, the withdrawal is only partial as Bandai Namco will still sell arcade machines in North America to other companies.

The decision was taken by the board of directors on Feb. 19 and the agreement with the three buyers was concluded on Feb. 27.

The sale will become effective on March 31. After that date, Namco USA will be merged with Bandai Namco Amusement America, which sells arcade games in the region.

Bandai Namco isn’t the only major publisher that recently made a move to pull back from the arcade business due to the slump caused by the pandemic. Sega completely withdrew from the business in Japan, while it’s keeping its Pachinko & Pachislot business.