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 holds 94% of the developer now. As of April 1st 2007 it had 132 (mid 2004: 117, April 1st 2006: 128) 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), with each new original game planned to have a planned development time of two years. With the expansion of the staff the diffuse separation between the teams becomes even misleading (e.g. Tales of Symphonia: Knight of Ratatosk, announced to be consisting of former ToS and TotA staffs along new staff, actually has the majority of old staff coming from Team Destiny games).
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(as of July 1st, 2008: Yoshimi Sawada (澤田 悦己, NBGI) was replaced)