Bandai Namco is closing Reflector Entertainment, the Montreal studio behind the 2024 action-adventure Unknown 9: Awakening. In a notice filed on November 10, Bandai Namco Holdings said its board had passed a resolution to dissolve and liquidate the subsidiary, ending a studio that was founded almost eleven years ago to build a multimedia universe and shipped one game.
What Bandai Namco announced
The notice is short and corporate in tone. Bandai Namco says it keeps reviewing its business portfolio and the way development is structured across the group, with an eye on medium- and long-term growth. After weighing Reflector's future business plans, the additional investment it would need, and its chances of turning a profit and continuing to operate, the company decided to discontinue Reflector's business and wind it up.
Reflector Entertainment Ltd. was established on December 29, 2015, and is based at 1100 Avenue des Canadiens-de-Montréal. Its listed representative is director and CEO Hervé Hoerdt. The studio is wholly owned by Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe, the publisher's European arm, which holds 100% of its shares. Its stated business was the planning and development of entertainment content such as home console games.
There is no closing date yet. Bandai Namco says the liquidation will be complete once the required procedures under local law are finished, and that a concrete schedule has not been decided. The filing does not say how many people still work at the studio or what will happen to them.
A €21 million hit
The closure comes with a cost. Bandai Namco expects to book an extraordinary loss of about €21 million, roughly ¥3.5 billion, in its consolidated results for the third quarter (the nine months to December) of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, and possibly afterwards. The company stresses that the figure is an estimate based on current information, and that both the final amount and when it lands could change depending on the liquidation process and on tax and accounting treatment.
The filing also lays out Reflector's books for the past three fiscal years, in Canadian dollars, and they explain the decision as plainly as any statement could:
- Year to March 2024: net sales of about CA$1.6 million and an operating loss of about CA$8.3 million.
- Year to March 2025, the period that included the launch of Unknown 9: Awakening: net sales of about CA$47.8 million, but an operating loss of about CA$18.5 million and a net loss of about CA$28.4 million.
- Year to March 2026: net sales of about CA$14.7 million and a small operating profit of about CA$2.6 million, though the bottom line was still a net loss of about CA$2.0 million.
By March 2026, Reflector's net assets stood at roughly minus CA$89.5 million, against share capital of about CA$46 million. On paper, the studio had been running on its parent's support for some time.
One game, one universe
Reflector was set up to do more than make a single game. Unknown 9 was pitched as a transmedia universe, a hidden history of secret societies and people who could tap into a parallel dimension called the Fold, meant to unfold across comics, novels, podcasts and games at once. Bandai Namco became the studio's owner in 2020, and the publisher released Unknown 9: Awakening in October 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One and PC.
The game starred Haroona, a young woman with the rare ability to reach into the Fold. Its main hook was a power called Stepping, which let her slip into an enemy's body for a few moments and use them against their allies: walking a guard into an explosive barrel or turning a gunman's weapon on his squad. That sat alongside third-person stealth, close-quarters fighting and story sequences that took her from the streets of 19th-century India across a globe-spanning conspiracy.
A studio that had already been shrinking
This is not a sudden collapse. Reflector cut staff shortly after Unknown 9: Awakening launched, and in early 2025 it confirmed that plans to extend the Unknown 9 franchise had been dropped because the game had not met expectations. At the time, the remaining team was said to be moving on to work tied to an existing Bandai Namco property. Today's filing does not mention any such project, and it presents the shutdown as the end of the studio's business altogether.
The financial table hints at what that period looked like from the inside. The modest operating profit in the year to March 2026 came after sales fell by about two-thirds, which reads like a far smaller team doing work for the wider group rather than a studio building its own next game.
What it means for players
For anyone who owns Unknown 9: Awakening, nothing changes today. Bandai Namco is the game's publisher, and the notice says nothing about the game, its store listings or its availability. It is a single-player game, so there are no servers to switch off. Still, with its developer being wound up, it is safe to assume no new content or meaningful updates are coming.
For the industry, it is another reminder of how hard it is to launch a brand-new universe at blockbuster scale. Reflector was created to build an original franchise from scratch at a time when publishers are leaning more heavily than ever on established series, and Bandai Namco has now decided that there is no path to making that bet pay off. The studio's lone game remains on sale. The universe it was supposed to start ends here.
