Imagine having a dedicated work force that wasn’t fighting to put food in the table or navigate whether they have healthcare.
Like… you’re done developing Halo Campaign Evolved and now you need to immediately fix uo your resume and start interviewing (fuck your doctors appointment next month) - instead of working on a new game. What a waste of everyone’s energy
They didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend
I guess by “didn’t get swept up” the author meant these companies didn’t go all-in like western studios, because all 3 have their portion of f2p mobile crap, with Konami being the worst offender with, PES Mobile, eFootball and others.
I suppose another big difference is shareholder expectation. In the US, if you don’t grow every quarter, you’re dead.
While that’s good the grass is not always greener the amount of time they are required to be at the office from a cultural pressure. To the point dying at work is a trope in anime.
Doesn’t Nintendo actually respect it’s devs, and avoids rushing games?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)
A black company (ブラック企業/ブラック会社, burakku kigyō/burakku gaisha), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for a company that is exploitative or abusive towards its workers.
(snip)
While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and “power harassment” (bullying) by their superiors. In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.
This is the norm in Japanese offices. I worked for 2 years in Japan in an office. Officially we were a white company and weren’t allowed to work overtime. However, we would get monthly emails from the office manager detailing everyone’s exact amount of overtime. Even though we were salary, we had to clock in and out to make sure we didn’t work overtime. The nominal reason for these emails was to tell people to lower their overtime since it wasn’t allowed. Those emails had the actual effect of ranking everyone by how much overtime they had worked and pressuring people with lower numbers to work later. People would regularly leave the office around 9 or 10pm. All hiring is done April 1st when a large cohort of college grads come in and they are expected to work there for life.
To be classified as a black company, and be named and shamed by the government, you have to like…cause a high profile suicide or something.
Sorry you had to go through that.
A single company doesn’t make the norm, though. Did you get insight into other companies too?
Just recently I watched a Japanese citizen saying its a common misconception, a prejudice. That just like there’s bad companies in other countries there are these in Japan. They just use a term, a label for them.
Japanese companies can’t lay off permanent employees without triggering things like hiring freezes and other consequences. They’re usually put in shit jobs to force them to quit (though this can be illegal) or are offered a buyout for several months of salary to quit.
also, plants grow better with water and sunshine in good measure, and a you are more healthy if you don’t eat burger every day.
Don’t Japanese companies outsource more labour and thus don’t require larger teams
The larger companies, including international ones, often outsource work to temp worker companies, where people can be let go fairly easily.
yea but the companies are mostly stagnant because of that too, they cant bring in new people to innovate, so they end up with slop.
As opposed to the slop the other companies create because everyone on the team is new and didn’t have time to do anything, so they just use AI?
Executives get 30 million for bring DEI policies and EGS money.
