Bandai Namco cancels new One Piece and Naruto games

One of the biggest companies in the gaming industry, Bandai Namco has cancelled 2 major video games that were in development: One Piece and Naruto, leading to a lot of speculation from fans, mainly if the budget has been exhausted or if they will invest more money in their latest game, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO and whether the cancellation of those projects will lead to massive layoffs within the Japanese company.

Bandai Namco cancels new One Piece and Naruto projects despite the success of Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO

Despite the worldwide success of Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO, Bandai Namco was unable to continue with 2 projects that were set to be as big as the recently released one: One Piece and Naruto, legendary and well-established franchises in the manga and anime industries. In addition, they were making another video game which was not named, but this time they decided not to, causing a stir in networks and a lot of speculation among fans of both franchises.

The first speculation of the end of these projects was the budget invested in DBSZ, which has not been officially presented by Bandai Namco, but it has revealed that in just one day it sold 3 million copies which is equivalent to approximately $200,000,000,000 million dollars, a success in sales and a fair reason to invest more efforts in content for Sparking! ZERO than in new games, but the sales success of the Budokai Tenkachi sequel may not be the reason for the cancellation of these new One Piece and Naruto games.

The icing on the cake and the main cause of potential layoffs was the cancellation of a game ‘exclusive to Nintendo Switch’ the name of this project has not been revealed, but it is rumoured that it was just in pre-production and the most convenient thing for the creators of Sparking! ZERO was to put an end to this game before it was even announced, despite having enough budget to get it off the ground, the consequences will be catastrophic for the Japanese company’s employees.

Fans of both franchises reacted in the following way: ‘I feel sad, but we need a game that’s good and fun’ “The only chance to have a good One Piece game is gone” ’I have a feeling the culprit for this is Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO’ “They don’t know what they’re doing anymore” “Sparking Zero stole their entire budget” “Oww… I wanted to play them” “F for Bandai” “Tell me that’s a lie”.

As for the franchises, the anime adaptations of Naruto and its sequel Shippuden as well as Boruto, all by Studio Pierrot (Tokyo Ghoul, Kingdom) have been harshly criticised and in many cases abandoned, with a loyal fandom and being exclusively niche series. However, the videogames that have been released, mainly the Ultimate Ninja Storm saga (made by Bandai) on consoles are really good and highly recommended, although little favoured by the specialised critics, so a timely cancellation was the most pertinent for Bandai Namco’s interests.

Meanwhile, Toei Animation’s anime adaptation of the pirates of Eiichirō Oda’s manga of the same name has been on the air since 1999 and is now in its 1150th episode. But its latest games for next-gen consoles such as Odyssey (developed by Namco), Pirate Warrios 4 and World Seeker were also not favoured by critics, another factor for the Elden Ring developer to protect its interests.