Bandai Namco to Invest $130 Million in Building Its Own IP Metaverse

Bandai Namco, one of the leading Japanese game development and publishing companies, is creating its own metaverse. The company announced the resolution in a document outlining its mid-term plan, which details the strategy the group will follow from April 2022 to March 2025. In the document, issued February 8, the company explains that this new metaverse will be part of its “IP Axis” strategy, to boost the engagement of fans with its franchises. The plan states:

In this IP metaverse, we are anticipating virtual spaces that will enable customers to enjoy a wide range of entertainment on an IP axis, as well as frameworks that leverage Bandai Namcos distinctive strengths to fuse physical products and venues with digital elements.

For this purpose, Bandai Namco announced it expects to spend 15 billion yen ($130 million) for the establishment of the data foundation and the development of the content for this intellectual property (IP) metaverse.

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

This is the case with Square Enix, developers of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts series, which has stated that it will be focusing on blockchain-based content and tokenized economies, apart from the content the company normally produces. Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda recently talked about the importance of these new technologies, and also how the new worlds will be able to reward users that generate content in a more fair way than is done currently.

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