Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Bandai Co., which is buying Namco Ltd. to create Japan's second-biggest maker of toys and video-game software, said costs may double to develop games for new consoles being sold by Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Investment to develop a new title could increase to 1 billion yen ($9 million) from between 100 million yen and 500 million yen now, Shin Unozawa, a managing director in charge of game software at Bandai, said today at the Tokyo Game Show.

Microsoft is releasing its Xbox 360 console on Nov. 22, while Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Co.'s Revolution are due to go on sale next year. Japanese game makers such as Bandai and Square Enix Co. have been seeking partners to share costs to develop games with higher-definition images, faster speeds and online capability to match the new consoles.

``Costs will begin to fall a year or so after the consoles are released and game makers get used to the systems,'' said Unozawa. Merging with Namco, the creator of ``Pac-man,'' will cut Bandai's software development costs by about 20 percent, he said, without giving a timeframe.

Bandai, whose characters include ``Digimon'' and ``Power Rangers,'' targets selling as much as 5.7 million game titles this year, up from 5.35 million last year, Unozawa said.

-- With reporting by Kiyotaka Matsuda in Tokyo. Editor: Gibson.

To contact the reporter on this story: Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 15, 2005 23:13 EDT