The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade
ign.com
ign.com
Isn't the solution unions, akin to the heavily unionized movie / TV business? Short of that, Nintendo deserves some bad PR for this at least; as long as people keep leaking their crappy workplace conditions to the press, the execs will have to keep reading these articles, and maybe be they'll be incentivized to make things slightly better.
Underlying problem is that Nintendo has a non-viable business model combined with a culture that tolerates things like rigid work hours and low pay. They can't make life better for employees because their business model sucks.
The correct thing is to simply not work for them.
A union can force better working conditions and an appropriate price increase for their products can make that sustainable - if it's even really needed, tbh Nintendo isn't shy about pricing games pretty high when you take into account all the re-releases of titles they do.
"The Nintendo 3DS was released in 2011 and immediately stalled, burdened by the lack of a compelling launch line-up, the rise of smartphones, and a $249.99 price point. Nintendo was forced to move aggressively, slashing the system's price and rolling out special benefits for existing owners. A year later, Nintendo released the Wii U, which fared even worse."
Sometimes Nintendo products don't strike a chord. It happens to any company with history in video gaming, including Sony and Microsoft.
Contractors aren't, by definition, any better or worse than full time employees. But when the going gets rough and the gruel is thin the good contractors will all immediately jump ship because, well, they're contractors - that will reinforce the concentration of lower skilled employees at your company and hurt overall morale.
Lastly, treating your coworkers like dirt will get them to give you the bare minimum to avoid being laid off and, if they're contractors anyways, that might not be any real threat - they can move back into the video game job market with the biggest most legendary game studio ever on their resume.
Even RetroArch copied the Switch UI, which indicates that at least the enthusiast community feels similarly.
imo The only time it works "well" is with successful indie companies.
Indie companies are the absolute worst - there are occasional success stories (like, say, No Man's Sky) but they always involve insane overtime and fiscal risk - Sean Murray sold his house to keep the company afloat. And No Man's Sky - even with all the controversy - is one of the biggest recent successes (with the last one to go as mainstream being Minecraft IMO). If you make those fiscal and health gambles and lose then you're SOL - there are thousands of games made by passionate people that could have been good that just never hit the right PR vein or happened to have a buggy v1.0 and got written off by the community.
These sweetheart deals are practically impossible for Indies (including ex-AAA workers) to compete against and replicate, and its leading to industry stagnation.
As long as the standard rate at Apple, Google, Valve, Microsoft, Sony remains 30%, I would not advise anyone to work in the games industry. At least Nintendo gives customers 5% cashback on Switch, leaving an effective commission rate of 25% (a major reason why that platform has been so successful and an oasis of success for Indie devs).
The first thing a GameDev Union should fight for is fair commission on these platforms, independent of entity size.
Still, it seems like there is a large oversupply of people who really want to work specifically on video games, and I think they deserve better working conditions than this, right? In an ideal world, there wouldn't be this Faustian bargain of "You can work on what you love, or you can be treated well at work."
So that might help, but some of NOA's current problem seems to be some mental baggage from their management about growing headcount after the struggles of the 3DS/Wii U era.
A normal company would have done layoffs. Nintendo doesn't do that, even without unions. But management who survived that era turned it into a culture of not taking on the seemingly existential risk of increasing permanent headcount in case there would be a future income crisis.
I'm not sure if unions would be more likely to help relieve that mental baggage, or help to force management to finally decide to work through it and figure out a way to manage for a stable workforce rather than this perm/temp duopoly that they have going on now.
It's got me wondering what's up at Nintendo. Their mainstay studios like HAL Laboratories and MercurySteam haven't changed all that much over the years, and their presentation quality and infatuation with design has yet to waver. Overall, I'm starting to think their hardware and management teams are the weakest links: their least successful and least appreciated ventures have been when they wandered outside of their walled garden to make a quick buck (Super Mario Run or Mario Kart Grand Prix, anyone?), second only to their questionable hardware designs over the previous 2 decades. I have nothing but respect for the way Nintendo's developers and engineers deliver a polished product for all kinds of consumers, but I struggle to imagine how they're going to continue to adapt to the market. Especially if they're continuing to merge their handheld and home console markets, I worry they could turn this Switch success into another Wii U moment.
Time will tell, but Nintendo's got quite a tumultuous history with some exceptional highs and dumbfounding lows.
Their weakest link is almost certainly their marketing team. The Wii U was really cool. Nintendo Land was insanely fun. The asymmetric local multiplayer was cool as shit. But nobody understood this. Most people didn’t know the Wii U was a different console.
There are a lot of people who are not like that. For example, there are huge popular mods for kerbal space program that add in military weapons and military vehicles. To some people that is cool as hell, to others its an abomination of the game. I think Nintendo's problem is also this same dichotomy and their popularity ebbs and flows with how the current game buying population leans. Population of gamers into safe and fun games like Mario? Nintendo does well and vice versa.
Then once the 3DS had some success, they had to confuse everyone once again with the "new 3DS" which I suppose was at least less of an issue since it wasn't really a new console. But it sure as hell makes the used market confusing, when you don't know the difference between a new 3DS unit and a used "new 3DS" unit
Well, that and the size of the market itself.
> Their games and online offerings, for the most part, frankly suck compared to their competitors.
Their online offerings, sure, I guess. But their games are good, even on their consoles that don't sell well. Nintendo made a lot of money by doing nothing more difficult than porting really good games on Wii U onto the Switch.
They make money on remakes of decades-old games with minor graphical and quality of life tweaks because the games are good.
Not everything likes all of their games, and that's fine, but many do.
Nintendo has never and probably will never try and seriously compete in the multiplayer arena - they've got some casual multiplayer stuff but they're not trying to out compete Call of Duty, Halo or Starcraft.
I do agree that they do milk those main properties for all their worth, but they're pretty careful about releasing bombs - Mario Odyssey was a pretty notable and dramatic fail for them but, again, the fact that their games suck to you doesn't matter. I'm a big fan of EU4 and as such Nintendo doesn't want my business - they cater to young and casual audiences building easy to access for the family games rather than historical simulators or Dark Souls.
In the United States and Europe, it became Nintendo's fastest-selling Super Mario game ever, with 1.1 million copies sold in the US within five days.[120][121] According to the NPD Group, the game was the best-selling video game of October 2017,[122] and was listed by Amazon as the online retailer's highest-selling game of the year.[123]
I suspect it just got overshadowed by Zelda Breath of the Wild, which really stole the show for the Switch launch year.
Edit: Trying to think which Mario game was NOT considered a success? Maybe Mario Sunshine? That goes back to the Gamecube, and looking at it now... that ALSO had good reviews. I don't think there's been a dud in the mainline Mario franchise... ever?
People really love to hate on SMB2 (NES).
There is still a lot of desire for games you can play with people at a party, or play with your children and spouse all together on the same screen. Every other videogame maker has abandoned that niche.
have you considered that you might be the one divorced from reality and the average consumer does not care about this?
I'm pretty sure forming a group and then finding a match was possible 10+ years ago.
Of course, that doesn't mean the average consumer cares. I'm not even sure I care that much (I'd pay for the online service and play more Tetris 99 if matchmaking was faster though... I don't like sitting around waiting to play, so I do other things instead)
For the online mode of Salmon Run, yes.
It's been a few years since I touched Splatoon but from what I recall, if you go to the arcade, you can set up a local co-op Salmon Run session anytime. It is/was not well-advertised.
The Switch platform has been a stellar success and isn't stopping any time soon. As a business, Nintendo is thriving.
Nintendo franchises stay pretty fresh relative to other franchises. Is your issue with the concept of franchises in general? Every platform/ecosystem has them.
For Nintendo, the first party platform and franchises have always been the central focus. They remain a hit, decade after decade. So, it's not clear what your beef really is.
Completely agree with you here and just want to emphasize that the 5% of the IPs they rehash over and over produce legendary games. Many of these games push the boundaries of gaming in every way possible.
Nintendo doesn't take good care of their customers.
There's the confusing half-step hardware upgrades which can potentially leave you with hardware that doesn't technically play the latest games, or has compatibility problems. There's the bizarre hoops you have to jump through to play games with friends online.
But the biggest thing that stops me from buying any new Nintendo platform is that it's going to expire in a way that no modern system should anymore. I have Steam and Microsoft accounts that have records of my purchases from 10 or 15 years ago, and all I have to do is log in and I can download and play them on any new system I get. I don't know how it works on Sony's systems, but I imagine that it's similar. My account is credited with the game, and I can play it when I want to.
When I hear about how people have to keep continually buying classic Nintendo games on their own built-in download service, or lose access to all of their games when they buy a different console unit of the exact same console, or give up on playing with their friends because they can't just tell the service "Account X is my friend," I'm just gobsmacked.
This article makes the case that this attitude of contempt extends to their own employees as well. I think they'd do quite well to eat some humble pie, but I'm not expecting much.
What is that? Do you mean "law"?
A contractor is supposed to be an outside expert, not a sub-employee.
A sexually-harassed FTE may be concerned that fighting for their rights is going to black-ball them in their career, but they rarely need be concerned that it'll cost all their colleagues their jobs, because a company is rarely incentivized to cut a whole department if one employee sues but can decide working with a contracted company isn't worth it, and go with one of their competitors to fulfill the contract, if one of the contracted employees makes waves.
Now imagine being a naive post-teenager being offered to work in "the greatest video game company of all time" but under the sole little condition that you are hired as a contractor.
It works with any big name that you would be personally proud to work for.
And what is even more saddening is that the more the brand is loved (Nintendo is part of the childhood of basically any today engineer), the more they can abuse those tactics. For a lot of people, working for $BIG_COOL_BRAND is already felt as such a gift that they would sign anything without negotiating.
Like everything in life, the older you get, the less you fall in those traps, but that’s not a problem : there is a continuous influx of new people ready to fall for the same tricks.
Adult. The word you’re looking for is adult.
TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.
People should be allowed to make mistakes in life, that's how we get innovation and economic growth - experiments are sometimes good and sometimes bad. In a lot of cases these new labour market entrants don't have any comprehension of what working actually means.
Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.
The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly. I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.
Your experience was extremely lucky.
Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.
> Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.
No, it really doesn't, but do you have any control over that?
> The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly.
That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford, have families they cannot afford, and otherwise spend well beyond their means. They're trying to have the life their parents and grandparents had and they're trying to have it immediately even though economic conditions do not support that. In short: They made bad decisions.
> I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.
Only? Did you live on your own or with your parents or roommates? Did you have a car or did you use public transportation? And how long is "a bit"?
> Your experience was extremely lucky.
Luck had nothing to do with it. I don't have a wife and kids. I don't own my own home. I sacrificed having that immediately in order to get ahead. Now that things are beginning to work out for me I can explore the possibility of having a family. That wasn't luck... that was planning.
That's a good self-reliant attitude, but in practice we are social creatures and we have influence beyond our own bodies. One can consider what one can do alone without interacting with others and what society should do about a deficiency in its constitution (little c) at the same time.
In the middle of the 20th century, two school systems in Virginia shut down their public education for overtly racist reasons. One entire class of high school students just missed public high school. A lot of them pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got a GED. They deserve everything that their hard work brought them. And they also deserved The reparations the state government eventually paid them as a compromise around the fact that it violated their civil right to a public education because they had the "wrong" skin color.
> That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford...
You may not have heard because the news is not widespread, but this upcoming generation (and the one currently in their twenties) will statistically on average have a worse life than the generation you're thinking of that bought houses with the money they made working. Everything is a McMansion now. Housing prices are insane for the same houses relative to the average American paycheck. There is no amount of bootstrapping and rugged individualism that will make life better off for the average American unless something changes drastically. And those young people have an absolute right to be pissed that the social structures that their parents' generation took advantage of were looted and gutted or allowed to rot by the time they came of age, and that the people with authority who should be solving new problems as they came along have proven utterly inept at dealing with modern challenges.
> That wasn't luck... that was planning.
Well, planning and luck. You didn't get in a car accident and end up stuck with debilitating medical bills when you were working a job that wouldn't offer insurance (And if every job you've worked came with health insurance, statistically that's an extraordinary stroke of luck). You have the luxury of living somewhere where public transportation was possible, either you were born there or at some point you had the means to get there.
And even with all that luck, you have sacrificed things that the previous generation could have assumed were a given by your age. Things you would have had access to if salaries had kept pace with the GDP. A pace that is set by policy that can be changed by law.
So by all means, in the context you find yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have pride in your accomplishments. You have earned them. But living in complacency that things just are the way they are when they were simply not that way for the previous generation or pretending you have no control over that and representative democracy is a cop-out. It's abdicating your fraction of citizen responsibility to build a better democracy for the next generation.
(... Primary elections are this month, and on average only a quarter of voters show up. If you vote, your vote is proportionally speaking four times as valuable ;) ).
Why are you making this personal?
> Once you hit the age of majority you're a functioning adult and you don't get to make excuses anymore. If you make a bad deal then you make a bad deal.
That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.
> TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.
Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice! It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.
You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.
Why are you avoiding responsibility? You don't control the world. You only control yourself. Change the things you can change.
> That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.
Almost no adults have any negotiating experience. That doesn't change anything. You're still responsible for your own actions. You will make mistakes. You will fail. You're still expected to get up and try again.
> Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice!
...but refusing to seek it out as an adult is. I didn't have someone to teach me these things. I learned them the hard way like everyone else.
> It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.
Actually, yes, that's exactly what it means. As an adult you are responsible for your own condition. No one else owes you anything.
> You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.
...which isn't going to happen. OTOH, individuals can learn how to adapt to the way things are and make things better for themselves. I find it interesting that teaching people how to take advantage of the present system and better themselves is viewed as "making this personal" and somehow a bad thing, whereas complaining and accomplishing nothing is not.
Ok true. Nobody said otherwise here. But are you implying it’s ok for companies to exploit this natural naivety ?
Yeah I sometimes find stuff I completely imagined interesting too.
The 'making it personal' part was the part I quoted. You took a general comment about contracting relationships and turned it into a claim that pjerem specifically "made poor life choices and paid for them".
It wasn't about anything else you said.
Absolutely nothing you’ve said has anything at all to do with contracting.
That's obviously not the case with the contractors described in the story, who are blatantly just direct employees in all regards except with less benefits.
Contractors will always live in a different world than full timers. It sucks, but that’s what it is.
X-Treme artist and developer, Chris Senn and Chris Coffin, became so ill during the development process, living under desks at SEGA Technical Institute and treated more like robots than humans.
Doctors said Coffin would be ‘dead in 6 weeks’ if he continued development, X-Treme was cancelled - and SEGA’s flagship mid 90’s Saturn console never got a mainline exclusive Sonic title.
The hell game developers often go through actually caused me to stray from my initial teenage ambitions of being a game dev. I’m so, so glad I chose mobile instead.
> The tax payer is subsidizing Nintendo because these people end up on unemployment for two months every year.
Contract workers are not eligible for unemployment except under a very small number of circumstances and simply not renewing a contract is not one of them.
Also, they are not 1099 contractors they work directly under companies such as Aerotek or whoever and get a regular W-2. Those companies then contract them to Nintendo.
It is privilege to have something you can sacrifice, and not just be trapped.
1% is staggeringly high. That's one and a half million people. If our system operates on exploiting one and a half million people, we should change that system.
My callcenter experience can be summed up as "better than fastfood or retail I guess"
This made me laugh
My dude, you’re not a citizen at all.
It feels shitty if you're of the mindset that you want to solve problems and not play legal games, but Lord knows the employer isn't incentivized to not try and wring every ounce of work out of you they can get for below-market FTE prices.
[0] https://medium.com/@techworkersco_79433/who-fired-the-ras-or...
[1] "The specific charge, as first reported by Axios, is levied against both Nintendo of America and recruiting firm Aston Carter, which hires contractors for various administrative and customer support roles at Nintendo." https://www.ign.com/articles/former-nintendo-employee-accuse...
It's not like Google, for example, is looking to hire you if you don't have one of the couple-dozen college names they're into on your résumé. But if you get hired by a contracting company that posts you at Google to do a contracted task, you'll get to put that "Worked at Google" experience on the résumé and get a leg up.
Plus some people (falsely) assume that the environment will be great because the company has a great reputation. At the interface of the contractor level, that varies widely. I had to go to bat at my old office because I randomly showed up on the weekend and found out all the contractors were working in 85-degree heat in an office building; the building turned the A/C off on the weekend to save power, and nobody had thought to ask it be turned on when we moved a whole contracting team in to work weekends.
At, not for.
That's different than the types of contractors that work for body shops like Accenture. Those "contractors" are not treated like business owners or employees, but a lower tier of replaceable cheap and servile labor resources. They also get paid much, much less than your typical contractor. Think like $30 to $40 an hour, obviously with zero benefits, and they aren't afforded the freedoms most freelancing devs enjoy, like the abilities to choose when, where and how their work gets done.
Most people have jobs without those perks. Does the fact that you do work for a company "in tech" make it worse that you're not showered with benefits? The margins aren't high and the work they are doing can be done by almost anyone.
Nintendo’s margins are almost 30%.
If the article only talked about conditions like what you're describing, it would be 1/8th as long and I wouldn't have complained.
"still possible to find bins of old VHS tapes"
"the soccer pitch, which is also off-limits"
"employees apologizing profusely if they left even 15 minutes early."
"being fired if they missed three days of work"
"Contractors are excluded from ... the company holiday party"
"feel unwelcome ... staying too long in Cafe Mario"
"the internal webpage we were encouraged to look at that showed ... benefits (like a sizable Christmas bonus)"
"march with Nintendo of America in the annual Pride parade"
...
1/2 are examples of an outdated workplace (and is meant to be an example of how bad the job is), 3 is an example of how different contractors are treated (and is rather silly), 4/5/6/7 are examples of an awful workplace, 8 is a further example of how they are treated as second class employees and 8 is similar to 3.
A lot of people deal with toxic workplaces, yes. That doesn't mean a crab in a pot mentality is a good one to have because it just ends up dragging everyone down to the most toxic workplace. Instead people should work on calling out and improving their workplaces, which was the intent of this article.
Protections at the interface of two companies, where the employee is not technically an employee of the main company, are thin on the ground and legally complicated. And whether intentional or not, this has the consequence of making a fertile ground for all manner of quasi-legal employee abuse.
I worked at a company where a contracted employee was sexually harassed by a full-time engineer, and the "support" she got from her boss was clear adavice to keep silent because if the main company felt the situation was too problematic she could cost everyone their job when the main company decided to contract out to another provider. Because that'd be easier for them than even confronting the full-timer responsible.
(... the videogame industry brings its own flavor of sickness to the table above and beyond these general concerns. While my friend was humiliated and depressed as hell about the situation, the reason the threat from her boss even held weight is because they would be there months down the road. A lot of game studios cut their contractors loose when the game is out the door; there's no job security to be had).
- weekly lunch
- get drunk on the company a handful of times a year
- dogfooding our product for free
- certs + professional development
A company offering substantially less than that I’d consider stingy or too up tight. Not appreciative of the workers. Look at low margin industries like the warehouse.
A company offering more, Id feel good about.
A company offering bean bags, video games, excessive alcohol, I’d definitely feel suspicious about. Who are you trying to buy with these trinkets?
Some people are so disconnected they think our company is stingy because our world class chef only oversees lunch service and dinner meals are only comped after 6....
Tech in general has a crazy entitlement problem when it comes to perks.
The mistake I see my fellow engineers make is assuming they're not disposable because they're full time, or that the axe won't eventually turn on them.
Contractor output is frequently technically shoddy or lazy; their reports are riddled with grammatical mistakes and frequently difficult to understand; and there is no way that they could take point when interfacing with a customer as their English skills simply aren't good enough.
But the quality of the contractors is ultimately irrelevant because we're talking about workplace protections and benefits. You SHOULD be blaming your company instead for taking cost saving measures that impact the rest of your organization. If your company is working with contractors that are core to your business then they should be treated the same as your employees. And we should be eliminating the middle area where companies want to treat contractors as lesser employees so they can pay them less for the same work.