41–50 of 149 posts
I never understand articles like this. Am I supposed to feel bad for playtesters because they don't have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches? 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.
Every single thing that a company does to contractors is something they eventually want to do to full time employees. If they could, they would convert everyone to contractor status, force awful methods of monitoring employee activity and more. 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.
Some of the attitude expressed in this comment section show just how out of touch a lot of you are. These contractors are not contractors by choice. They are not even contractors in the sense you probably think like sending an invoice to Nintendo and having it paid. They work for shitty companies like Aerotek that provide very little benefits AND they can only work 10 out of the 12 months of the year due to laws tryi…
> Contractors increasingly see themselves as second-class citizens This made me laugh My dude, you’re not a citizen at all.
I never understand articles like this. Am I supposed to feel bad for playtesters because they don't have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches? 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.
I suppose this is run-of-the-mill for the video game industry, but man, it's sounds so hellish; people deserve not be humiliated like this at work. 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,…
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.
The past 20 years for Nintendo have been pretty interesting, to say the least. They started with the Gamecube, a console that sold weak numbers and faced stuff competition despite it's library of modern classics. They followed that up with the iPhone of game consoles, the Wii, and moved hundreds of millions of units like it was no big deal. Seeking to capitalize on that same success, they made the Wii U, which seemin…
Nintendo has a lot of cash and is more of a toy company than a console company. I tend to think they will be fine. 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.
The past 20 years for Nintendo have been pretty interesting, to say the least. They started with the Gamecube, a console that sold weak numbers and faced stuff competition despite it's library of modern classics. They followed that up with the iPhone of game consoles, the Wii, and moved hundreds of millions of units like it was no big deal. Seeking to capitalize on that same success, they made the Wii U, which seemin…
I never understand articles like this. Am I supposed to feel bad for playtesters because they don't have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches? 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.
Every single thing that a company does to contractors is something they eventually want to do to full time employees. If they could, they would convert everyone to contractor status, force awful methods of monitoring employee activity and more. 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.
I never understand articles like this. Am I supposed to feel bad for playtesters because they don't have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches? 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.