Namco Bandai's announced it's distributing and co-publishing next year's Star Trek in a partnership with Paramount Pictures, which will be overseeing the game's development. With the inglorious grunt-work of actually making the game being handled by Bioshock 2/Darkness 2 dev Digital Extremes, the title modestly aims to leverage the storied Kirk/Spock pairing into “the ultimate co-op experience” sometime before next May, when the new movie's released. Do or do not, there is no try - isn't that what Star Trek says?
It's a fine week for Namco Bandai, with the company announcing an almost 50% growth in year-over-year profits – despite losing ground in sales outside of Japan, a failing the company aims to address with Western partnerships like the Star Trek deal. It's also announced the formation of a new internal studio, Namco Bandai Studio (what else would you call it?), to handle production of star franchises such as Tekken and Tales
Above: Spock doubtless has a bad feeling about this (oh yeah, we know our Star Trek)
The latter, you'll recall, has been orphaned since the closure last year of Tales Studio – but with Namco Bandai singling out Tales of Xilia as a key driver in last quarter's exceptional growth, the studio's staff will doubtless be well treated at their new home within the freshly-launched studio. May the Force be with them!
