Namco Tales Studio (（株）ナムコ・テイルズスタジオ)
Namco Tales Studio was jointly established by Namco and now defunct Telenet Japan in March 2003, with Namco holding 60% (which it bought from Telenet for 700 million yen), Telenet (Kazuyuki Fukushima) 34% and others (possibly Eiji Kikuchi) 6% of the shares. The change into Namco Tales Studio marks the end of Telenet's Wolfteam development team officially working on the Tales series. Tales Studio was established to be able to develop several projects at the same time and release at least one new Tales game every year.
Effective on April 1st 2006 NBGI (Namco Bandai Games Inc.) bought the remaining 34% by Telenet for 668 million yen and thus held 94% of the developer. In 2009 NBGI bought the remaining 6%. As of April 1st 2011 it had 109 (mid 2004: 117, April 1st 2006: 128, April 1st 2007: 132, April 1st 2009 135, April 1st 2010 124) employees.
At the Tales 2008 conference Bandai Namco head Ishikawa announced that Tales Studio has hired ~50 more people since. When Tales Studio was formed it consisted of two major groups, the traditional team working on 2D (usually called Team Destiny) and another one working on 3D Tales games (called Team Symphonia) more closely with Namco, with each new original game planned to have a planned development time of two years. With the changes of the staff the diffuse separation between the teams becomes even misleading. Contrary to earlier announcements the staff size reached an all time low in 2011.
On January 1st 2012 Namco Tales Studio was dissolved as a legal entity and its staff fully absorbed by Namco Bandai Games Inc. with the subsequent announcement, that starting April 2nd all of Bandai Namco's internal development will be moved to Bandai Namco Studios Inc. with former Tales Studio staff accounting for just 80 of the over 1000 people total, again significantly down from the last Tales Studio number. It remains to be seen through Xillia 2 and future games how much of the staff found work within other parts of Namco Bandai.
List of former NTS staff that didn't make the move into BNSI.
Board
(as of July 1st, 2008: Yoshimi Sawada (澤田 悦己, NBGI) was replaced; as of May 20th 2009: Takashi Shoji (東海林 隆, NBGI) was replaced, as of April 1st 2010: Makoto Yoshizumi (吉積 信, NBGI), Naomiki Yanagisawa (柳沢 直幹, NBGI) and 萩田 慎吾 (NBGI) were replaced, as of April 1st 2011 Makoto Yoshizumi (吉積 信, NBGI) was readded, and 藤沢 聖子 (NBGI) replaced)