Namco Networks was an American developer and publisher of video games for mobile phones, based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

. The company was founded on January 1, 2006, as the mobile phone division of Namco America, and produced video games for mobile phones in North America, Europe and Asia, many of which were ports of older Namco video games. Their first release was a port of '' Pac-Man'', which was part of a batch of nine titles to be released for the iPod. Namco Networks' licensed port of '' Scene It? Movies'' is regarded as one of the first North American mobile games to incorporate downloadable, streaming video content for phones. In 2011, the company was merged with Namco Hometek, who was Namco's older home console division, to form Bandai Namco Games America, which subsequently became Bandai Namco Entertainment America in 2015.

History

The division started in 2003 as the mobile gaming arm of the arcade group Namco America and was spun off when that group was strategically acquired by Bandai Namco Holdings and renamed as Namco Networks to serve as its mobile games division. In mid 2004 the group only had four full-time staff positions and contracted game development out to a number of mobile developers. By 2007 it had built its own internal development and marketing group and the staff was well over 100, also employing a large contract QA arm. The shift in mobile publishing from carriers to app stores after introduction of the iPhone shifted the marketplace to the division's detriment. In November 2010, Namco Networks laid off 90 staffers and stated that more of the work would be shifted to its counterpart in Japan,Namco Bandai to lay off 90 employees in the U.S. , VentureBeat
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Bandai Namco Games is a Japanese multinational video game publisher headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo. Its international branches, Bandai Namco Entertainment America and Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe, are respectively headquartered in Irvine, California an ...

that was once known as Bandai Networks prior to the merger.

References

External links

Official website (archived)
Former Bandai Namco Holdings subsidiaries Video game publishers Video game companies disestablished in 2011 Defunct video game companies of the United States Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Video game development companies Companies based in San Jose, California Video game companies established in 2006 2006 establishments in California 2011 disestablishments in California American companies established in 2006 American companies disestablished in 2011 {{SanJoseCA-stub