Bandai Namco to invest $130 million in building its own IP metaverse

Bandai Namco, a game development and publishing company, has announced its intention to create its own metaverse to increase fan engagement with the brand. The strategy was announced during the presentation of its new medium-term plan, which outlines the company’s roadmap for the next three years. The company expects to spend 15 billion yen ($130 million) on this project.

Bandai Namco seeks to increase commitment to the Metaverse project

Bandai Namco, one of Japan’s leading game development and publishing companies, is creating its own metaverse. The company announced the resolution in a document outlining its medium-term plan, detailing the strategy that the group will follow from April 2022 to March 2025. In the document, issued on February 8, the The company explains that this new metaverse will be part of its “IP Axis” strategy to increase fan engagement with its franchises. The plan says:

In this IP metaverse, we are anticipating virtual spaces that will allow customers to enjoy a wide range of entertainment on an IP hub, as well as structures that leverage Bandai Namco's various strengths to fuse physical products and locations with digital elements.

To that end, Bandai Namco announced that it expects to spend 15 billion yen ($130 million) to establish the database and develop the content for this intellectual property (IP) metaverse.

Metaverse as business strategy

Bandai Namco refers to this metaverse pivot as a very important part of the company’s future, citing the metaverse concept as one of the key strategies in its digital business plan. Other Japanese companies in the field have also started to introduce new concepts, including token saving and user-generated content as part of their medium- and long-term strategies.

This is the case with Square Enix, developer of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts series, which has stated that it will focus on blockchain-based content and tokenized economies, in addition to the content that the company normally produces. Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda recently spoke about the importance of these new technologies, as well as how the new worlds will be able to reward users who generate content more fairly than is currently done.

Krafton, another gaming company, announced this month that it will be participating in metaverse and NFT projects, revealing investments in companies that will allow it to create a metaverse project based on its PUBG intellectual property.