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Good news for the people at Namco – despite economic turmoil this year, profits are up for the company (see the 162nd Ferengi Rule of Acquisition for our obligatory geek reference of the day). This means business moves forward and sometimes can also mean expansion although at the moment we aren’t seeing many businesses do that as it still seems to be a good time to wait things out in that regardand see where the chips are going to fall. There isn’t much information about how amusement game sales contributed to all of that, although from the Gamasutra article there is a brief snippet about Namco owned amusement facilities:
Revenues from Namco Bandai amusement facilities were flat at 14.7 billion yen ($190.5 million), though same store sales in Japan were up 7.9 percent year-over-year. Namco now operates just 29 amusement facilities in the U.S., down from 41 a year ago and 88 in 2009. Japanese amusement locations are down to 217 from 223 a year ago and 293 in 2009.
Namco had to close a lot of bad locations to get to those numbers, which is sometimes necessary, whether you are in the arcade business or not. What would be interesting to get out of all this are the numbers for Namco’s arcade machines both in the US and Japan, but it’s pretty rare (i.e. never) we get such insight into that category.
[Via Gamasutra] [Namco America]
