Bandai Namco Holdings announced on November 10 that it has decided to dissolve and liquidate Reflector Entertainment, the Canada-based studio it acquired in September 2020.

Reflector is best known as the developer of Unknown 9: Awakening, and Bandai Namco had bought the studio to strengthen its portfolio of locally developed console games for the Americas and Europe.

The liquidation will be completed once the necessary legal procedures are finished locally, with no schedule announced yet. Both Automaton and Rock Paper Shotgun report the closure.

The shutdown is the endpoint of a long decline rather than a sudden collapse. Automaton reports that the game failed to meet expectations, and 2025 brought further redundancies amid the cancellation of a prospective project.

Unknown 9 was also meant to anchor a transmedia franchise spanning comics and novels — ambitions that never came to pass.

What stands out is the cost and the candor of the decision. Bandai Namco expects to record an extraordinary loss of about 21 million euros — roughly $23.5 million USD, or 3.5 billion yen per Rock Paper Shotgun — in its Q3 fiscal report.

The company's own press release frames the shutdown around a review of "future business plans, necessary additional investment, and the possibility of profitability and business continuation."

For Reflector's employees, the timeline depends on local legal procedures, which Rock Paper Shotgun notes makes the schedule uncertain.

The outlet also draws a parallel to Arkane Lyon, which was chosen for closure by Microsoft but is temporarily protected by French labor laws requiring negotiation before a shutdown — a contrast that highlights how differently closures play out across jurisdictions.

Reflector's dissolution also closes the book on a transmedia bet that never materialized, and it lands amid what Rock Paper Shotgun describes as a slew of smaller studios being dissolved by their parent companies.