Bandai - A Terrible Company that Nobody Talks About

>Make a new figure/mokit/game line >Shit sells well >Release the next batch as limited version to increase profit >People stop buying >Thinking people are tired of the new line and completely scrap the whole thing >Repeat

Meanwhile the Gundam fanbase having to deal with real-life DLCs for Gunpla for years and hoping every release isn't p-bandai

Bandai didn't promote their product properly in the west also Bandai, "The West hates Japanese products so we will limit them"

Heres something you didn't bring up. Blue Protocol when it first launched in Japan had a deluge of foreigners interested in trying it out early, fair enough right? Thats rather common especially for games that are gonna get localized WAAAY later. Bandai however did not like this so they took it upon themselves to tunnel vision ban any foreigners they can find and keep focusing on that. How tunnel visioned were they? While they were focus firing on banning foreigners they had let rampant hacking go unchecked for months on end. People found they could not participate in playing the game because hackers were using cheats that let them kill every mob in the overworlds instantly and were not being banned. Bandai genuinely would rather let their products burn to the ground from hackers than let foreigners try out the game cause "OH MY GOD DEM FILTHY GAIJINS ARE TOUCHING OUR PURE NIPPON PRODUCT".

"To love Digimon is to love pain." I feel that on a personal level

Bandai the second a live service game doesn’t make a bajillion dollars in the first week: “death”

Being a .hack//, Tales of, Ace Combat, Digimon, Soul Calibur, Super Robot Taisen, Ridge Racer, Klonoa, Xenosaga, Little Tail, Time Crisis, Legend of Valkyrie, Gundam and Splatterhouse fan is to live in a eternal pain.

Imagine where Digimon would be right now if its full potential wasn't being held back by Bandai...

Every Elden Ring player knows the horror of BanDai Namco. >Start game. >FLASHBANG

Now I understand why AliExpress is absolutely filled with fake Onepiece cards...

I feel like a lot of Bandai's problems stem from a degree of xenophobia. They are a Japan based company with a heavy "Japan first" bias, and as much as they want a slice of the global market their manufacturing capability is very limited and they don't want to lose the footing they have on their own turf just to sell to the rest of the world, so not only do they limit availability through their own p-bandai storefront they also threatened export stores and demand they don't sell gunpla directly overseas so as not to cut into their own market. They say it's to curb scalping, but the end result is they get to vet which American stores get to sell their products with no one allowed to bypass that except HobbyLink(which is more trouble than it'll ever be worth). Basically they want to have their cake and eat it too, and it's just not working. Frankly I'm waiting to see them drop out of the global market altogether, because that seems much more likely than them getting their act together outside of their own country.

We now know why Tomino was furious when he learned Bandai bought Sunrise.

As a Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Ultraman fan I know all too well the scumminess of Bandai and their obsession with Pbandai.

Bandai is the Asian EA.

I work in a comic store in Canada, and we have to fight and struggle to even get Bandai products in stock! They ignore you, lie to you about availability, refuse service after attempting to place orders... Just a terrible company.

As a gunpla builder in Australia, I really dont like bandai's obsession with p-bandai. P-bandai kits are really annoying to get over here (usually costing about double to triple the price as you have to use a proxy service) and the recent delegation of wfm stuff to peeb makes me so danm sad

Sadly a lot of Japanese companies are tone deaf. They will go backwards instead of going forward. SEGA of Japan instantly comes to mind. At 1 point they were ruling the console market. But shot themselves in the foot by pumping out expesive add-ons like the SEGA CD with little to no marketing or clarification on what it was. And they went against their American branch's advise to not roll out the Saturn so soon because the Genesis was still selling well. They always found a way to overextend themselves. And now they're nothing more than a 3rd party game publisher.

Being a SoulCalibur fan is suffering thanks to Bandai Namco’s stupidity

As an aside, I wish people would also talk more about how incompetent and terrible of a company Hasbro is. They're not (always) outright malicious like Bandai usually, but my god they are the most frustrating company ever when it comes to mismanaging their franchises and undermining their own potential. I'm mainly a fan of their franchises, so I'm exposed to their BS more, but I've definitely been exposed to Bandai's brand of stupidity too just by association.

Problem is that, Bandai don't give a shit. Love it or hate it, they have way too many insanely profitable IPs, and they can keep doing this disgusting tactics for the next 20, 30 years and never face any real consequence. Artificial scarcity doesn't help their reputation, but it sure as hell help their sales. And that's all they care about. Source: Living in a SEA country where hot P-Bandai item sells out in less than 1 second, scooped by bots deployed by scalpers.