One of the biggest video game publishers in history is scrambling to deny a scathing report that, among many things, stated it is trying to get employees to voluntarily quit with an “expulsion room.”
Bandai Namco, a company known for publishing notable video game hits, from Pac-Man to Dark Souls, was the subject of a blistering report from Bloomberg that outlined the myriad issues afflicting the company — and the odd ways the company is combating them.
“Bandai Namco Holdings Inc. is cutting its workforce after canceling several titles in the latest sign that rising costs and plateauing demand are depressing the gaming’s industry’s bottom lines,” the report opened.
Now, as the report alluded to, the rocky state of the video game industry isn’t exactly a secret.
The common sentiment is that the games industry — not unlike certain streaming and tech ventures — got bloated with COVID-19-related excess and is now course-correcting at the cost of jobs.
But while major gaming outlets like Sony and Microsoft are outright laying people off by the thousands, things are a bit trickier for Japan-based Bandai Namco.
And that’s because Japanese labor laws make it notoriously difficult for companies to lay people off simply because times are hard.
(Sony, while being a Japanese-based company, as well, has enough U.S.-based offices and studios to skirt many of those laws in certain jurisdictions.)
In response to those laws, Bloomberg reported that Namco is using something known in Japanese as “oidashi beya,” which roughly means “expulsion room.”
Have you ever heard of these “expulsion rooms” before?
“Employees are typically given no work-related tasks, but are left with the knowledge that their performance will give managers ammunition to cut severance when they do leave,” the report stated.
It added: “Many employees use their time in such rooms to look for other jobs.”
It effectively functions as a shame room to push employees to look for other work.
Bandai Namco strongly refuted Bloomberg’s report.
“Our decisions to discontinue games are based on comprehensive assessments of the situation,” a Namco representative told the news outlet. “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.”
The representative added: “There is no organization like an ‘oidashi beya’ at Bandai Namco Studios designed to pressure people to leave voluntarily.”
For a slightly more noble example of how Japanese companies deal with strict labor laws, one can look to Nintendo.
As chronicled by CNBC, after the catastrophic failure of its Wii U system, Nintendo’s executives — including the CEO — slashed their own salaries by half in lieu of being unable to lay off its staff en masse.
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