Bandai Namco Is Shutting Down Reflector Entertainment

Bandai Namco has announced it is closing Reflector Entertainment, the Canadian studio behind Unknown 9: Awakening. The company decided to end the studio’s operations, dissolve it, and liquidate it.

Bandai Namco says the decision came out of a review of its portfolio and internal development structure. The publisher weighed the studio’s future plans, the extra investment it would need, and its profitability, and concluded that closing Reflector Entertainment was the better option.

The closure will cost Bandai Namco money. The company expects a €21 million extraordinary loss, which it will book in its results for the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027. Bandai Namco didn’t give a timeline for the liquidation. It will wrap up once all required procedures under Canadian law are complete.

Bandai Namco acquired Reflector Entertainment in September 2020. In 2022, the studio was supposed to start working on well-known Bandai Namco franchises, but those plans never happened. Its only game was Unknown 9: Awakening, released on October 18, 2024, for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

The game was meant to launch a big franchise that would span comics, novels, and podcasts as well as games. Anya Chalotra, known for playing Yennefer in Netflix’s The Witcher, starred in the lead role. Unknown 9: Awakening flopped anyway. Critics gave it lukewarm reviews, with Metacritic scores between 54 and 64 depending on the platform.

Sales were weak too. In its first month, the game peaked at just 285 concurrent players on Steam. According to SteamDB, only 3 people were playing it on Steam at the time of writing, and the 24-hour peak was 8. Even the news of the studio’s closure barely stirred any interest: over the past week, the player count never went above 12.

A month after launch, Reflector Entertainment laid off 18% of its staff, though the studio denied at the time that the cuts had anything to do with sales. In January 2025, Bandai Namco Europe admitted that Unknown 9: Awakening had sold far below expectations and canceled plans for sequels. Now, almost two years after the failed launch, the studio is closing for good. It’s still unclear what will happen to Unknown 9: Awakening itself or to the rights to the franchise.