Globally Expanding the Digital Business Driven by Regionally Optimized Marketing

In the Digital Business, we established a worldwide marketing structure in FY2025.3 that links our marketing activities in Japan and North America with the aim of further expanding home console games on a global basis. This structure has facilitated smoother communication between our Japanese and North American marketing teams and deepened the mutual understanding of marketing plans in each region. In this way, the new structure has been yielding good results, including strengthening the collaboration between team members in each region and accelerating the overall speed of our business.
In FY2025.3, mainstay titles such as the large-scale DLC ELDEN RING SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE and DRAGON BALL Sparking! ZERO drove overseas sales. Amid the strong sales of the base game ELDEN RING, we strategically tailored the messaging, timing, and promotional tools for the DLC ELDEN RING SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE to effectively showcase its appeal. By doing so, we acquired new fans of ELDEN RING, which in turn contributed to an overall increase in the game’s sales. For DRAGON BALL Sparking! ZERO, we held a pre-launch road tour in North America to showcase the game’s exhilarating gameplay experience, which proved to be highly effective. In FY2026.3, the first year of the current Mid-term Plan, we aim to maximize our market share in the large-scale North American and European markets by carrying out marketing strategies optimized for each individual region for such titles as ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN and LITTLE NIGHTMARES III, which have a large international fan base.
Through the marketing activities we implemented in each region under the previous Mid-term Plan, we gained a sense of the growing global demand for Japanese IPs. Meanwhile, we recognized the importance of closely analyzing the increasingly segmented markets and preferences of target audiences in each region. For example, our approach in North America, where digital sales are the mainstream, needs to differ from that in Europe, where physical sales are still going strong. Given the fact that North America and Europe are the largest markets for home console games, we will continue to examine marketing strategies and resource allocation tailored to regional preferences as we work to increase sales over the long term.
Bandai Namco’s strength in the home console game market is its ability to use insight on how IP-based titles are recognized and rolled out in each region to shape its next development and marketing strategies. By ensuring that the importance of regionally optimized marketing is thoroughly understood across the Group, we can further accelerate our global business expansion. Our first step in this process is to serve as an agile and reliable coordinator between Japan, Europe, and North America, bolstering collaborations between these regions so that we can better communicate the appeal of our titles on a global scale.