Bandai Namco’s grand attempt at an “explosive” all-original, all-Western, and all-woke IP, Unknown 9: Awakening, has bombed so hard that even its own developers can’t help but admit it.
Released in October 2024, the game was a disaster right out of the gate, stuffed to the brim with forced racial diversity, starring an utterly unappealing Indian female protagonist, Haroona, while the only White representation came in the form of the games main villain.
Developed by Reflector Entertainment, a studio Bandai Namco acquired in a bid to launch this so-called “mega-franchise” into the stratosphere, Unknown 9: Awakening instead crashed straight into the dumpster, much like Sony’s Concord.
With an abysmal peak of just 285 players on PC a month after launch, Reflector Entertainment swiftly announced layoffs, and now their CEO has finally broken the silence on this catastrophic failure via LinkedIn.
But this wasn’t just any generic, DEI-infested trash fire, it was a certified Sweet Baby Inc special. Unknown 9: Awakening proudly flaunted its forced commitment to diversity and inclusivity, courtesy of its Canadian developers and their clueless Japanese overlords at Bandai Namco, who still refuse to learn that chasing “global audiences” leads straight to financial ruin.
Worse yet, the game was narratively spearheaded by none other than Kim Belair, co-founder of the infamous Sweet Baby Inc, a consultancy firm notorious for shoving their activism into games while tanking their sales.
These are the same hacks responsible for weaponizing cancel culture over publicly available information, all while leaving behind a trail of failures, including Alan Wake 2 (which featured yet another one of their signature race-swaps), Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and the outright embarrassing Crush House.
This was supposed to be Bandai Namco’s big step into the Western market. Instead, it’s yet another corpse added to the growing pile of “diversity-first” flops.
Reflector Entertainment has officially pulled the plug on an in-development project and announced another round of layoffs following the disastrous launch of Unknown 9: Awakening. Studio CEO Hervé Hoerdt confirmed that he scrapped the project, which was still in the “conceptualization phase,” stating that continuing development “would not have been sustainable for the future of the studio.”
This marks Reflector’s second wave of layoffs in just a few months. The studio previously cut staff in November 2024, a mere month after Unknown 9: Awakening flopped, though at the time, they claimed the layoffs weren’t due to “commercial success or external pressures.”
Instead, studio general manager Marc-André Séguin insisted the cuts were simply a result of not having enough work to justify their workforce. Back then, the studio was juggling “two key production lines in early development” one of which, based on Hoerdt’s statement, was likely some sort of ill-fated Unknown 9 follow-up.
Now, that too has been tossed in the bin, sealing the franchise’s fate.
Bandai Namco, once a powerhouse in the Japanese gaming industry, has willingly walked itself into financial ruin by embracing globalized ideologies. The company has long been entrenched in the DEI and ESG racket, prioritizing investor-friendly “social responsibility” metrics over actual sales and profitability.
Their latest casualty? Blue Protocol, a once-promising MMORPG now scrapped for a Western release after a disastrous year in Japan, plagued by censorship and a barren content roadmap.
In September 2020, Bandai Namco acquired Reflector Entertainment for an undisclosed sum, betting big on the studio to launch a sprawling cinematic universe around Unknown 9. This grand vision included not just games but also podcasts, comics, and novels.
Fast forward four years, and Unknown 9: Awakening, the studio’s first and likely only release has bombed so catastrophically that Reflector’s next project has already been axed. Bandai Namco’s entire investment has gone up in flames, leaving them scrambling to figure out what to do with their Canadian Marxists.
Reflector CEO Hervé Hoerdt isn’t mincing words, directly blaming Unknown 9: Awakening for the studio’s demise. While sales figures remain undisclosed, the numbers on Steam speak for themselves: a humiliating 49% positive user rating and a peak concurrent player count of just 285 (via SteamDB). While not the absolute worst failure to come out of Sweet Baby Inc., the sheer scale of this financial black hole is staggering.
Bandai Namco purchased an entire studio solely for this project, then pumped an estimated $100+ million into it only for it to crash and burn with a player base smaller than most indie titles. This wasn’t just a failure; it’s an all-time corporate blunder, just one of many for Bandai Namco as of late.
CEO Hervé Hoerdt claims that affected employees will receive “adequate severance packages,” extended health benefits, counseling, and “proactive career planning support.” Meanwhile, Bandai Namco—despite Unknown 9: Awakening flopping spectacularly remains committed to its misguided mission of creating “Western content for global audiences.”
In other words, the company refuses to learn from its mistakes and will double down on ESG-driven identity politics instead of prioritizing actual quality and consumer demand.
This is the same Bandai Namco that recently removed male and female terminology in the Freedom Wars remaster, replacing it with genderless “Body Types” in yet another pathetic attempt to pander to the Twitter crowd. It’s also the same Bandai Namco that recently absorbed its failing online division after Blue Protocol’s Western release was canned.
Every move they make reeks of corporate incompetence, and with their unwavering allegiance to DEI, ESG, and BlackRock’s ideological demands, they have no path to profitability.
The gaming industry is rapidly approaching a reckoning. As radical feminists and progressives infest executive positions and development studios, consumers are pushing back by shunning these malignant woke products.
The result? A second video game crash looms on the horizon, where major companies will collapse under the weight of their own unprofitability and blind ideological fanaticism. Bandai Namco, once a juggernaut, is now just another corporation circling the drain.
