Japan's strict laws surrounding dismissal make "layoffs" look a little different.
Bandai Namco employees are reportedly the latest victim of a wildfire of videogame layoffs 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 Bloomberg, 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 extremely strict 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.
“Nearly 100 have resigned, said the people, asking not to be named discussing private information,” Bloomberg claims.
This coincides with several cancelled projects for the company—Blue Protocol was shuttered in August, 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 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 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 website LeakPress, 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”.
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. While giving a talk in 2016, 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:
“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 ancient Eurogamer article that confirms the incident, as well as this (machine-translated) article from GNN News 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.
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