it's a German studio, and they've worked on Tropico. 'Then we met with these fantastic guys at Limbic. 'When you have the right game, like Elden Ring, people would buy it on Christmas Eve.' Because although it is competitive, there is a low barrier to entry. 'We did a lot of work on this strategy, and the construction management game was one of the segments we wanted to tackle. We needed to look at the gaming landscape, the individual markets and which ones are competitive and so on,' Hoerdt explains.

So there's a market, but also a fair bit of competition. The construction management genre has proven popular in recent years, through games such Jurassic World: Evolution and Planet Coaster from Frontier, and Two Point Hospital by Sega. Park Beyond is a theme park game, with over-the-top, gravity-defying rides as its key selling point (they use the word 'impossification'). The firm took a minority stake in developer Limbic earlier this year, and at Gamescom revealed the first game from that partnership called Park Beyond. 'Д«andai Namco's acquisition of Unknown 9 developer Reflector was one of its more significant moves, but there have been others. 'You've seen the Reflector acquisition, and some of our signings, and there's more that I could tell you, but our PR director is on the call. It takes a lot of time and energy to deliver this. 'That's a strategy that we started three or four years ago, with some success, especially with Little Nightmares, but also some difficulties with other titles. 'That was really gratifying because of our strategy,' says HervГ© Hoerdt, SVP of Digital, Marketing & Content at Bandai Namco Europe. Then in August, the firm was picked up numerous accolades - including Best Line-Up - at the Gamescom Awards. The firm set out a vision that stated 50% of its catalogue will come from the West, and it's also found its first big Western breakthrough hit in Little Nightmares. It's actually 11 years this week since the company published Ninja Theory's excellent Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. From the moment it acquired Atari's distribution business and began to establish itself a European presence, the company began signing games and doing some co-publishing deals on Western-developed titles.

It's one of Japan's biggest games companies, and responsible for globally recognised brands.ДЄnd yet Bandai Namco's mission to become a major player in the Western world has been a mixed affair.

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