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The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

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Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#51

Post by hbn »

oneoff786 wrote: post #18
smoldesu wrote: post #9

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.

It's also wild how they flubbed the name so hard with the Wii U, right after they flubbed the name with the 3DS that had the same issue in early days, where people thought it was just another variant of the DS (which already had several variants previously)

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

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#52

Post by junar »

kodah wrote: post #19
kjs3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, weird...'contractor' as an employment category by definition means that a company doesn't deal with you as a regular employee. What exactly did these people think they signed up for?

Employers make it a point, often, to blur the lines. Contractors, by government definition, get to choose their own hours, their own tools, they must be compensated dynamically for their expenses. When I was a contractor I felt that I was an FTE with shittier benefits; I was told where to be and when to be there, my tools were dictated to me, and if I ever asked about purchasing something to do my job better I was as…

The word "contractor" is overloaded. Many folks, apparently including the Nintendo workers described [1], are actually not contractors, in the 1099 sense, under the law. Instead, they are W-2 employees of Company B, which is hired by Company A. Company B is legally responsible for offering them benefits, but they don't have to be equal to Company A's.

[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...

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#53

Post by lostgame »

I’m reminded of the saddening story behind (potentially) SEGA’s greatest failure that essentially killed them in the console business - the development hell that was Sonic X-Treme.

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.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#54

Post by somehnacct3757 »

guelo wrote: post #26
oneoff786 wrote: post #3

> Contractors increasingly see themselves as second-class citizens This made me laugh My dude, you’re not a citizen at all.

What is your point? Sencond-class citizen seems like a valid analogy for two types of employees.

Perhaps making a reference to the fact that employees (contract or otherwise) are more like subjects than citizens.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#55

Post by pjerem »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #32
Dylan16807 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but tentatively I think the answer is yes. They avoid the legal standards for employment by abusing a 'contractor' legal status. A contractor is supposed to be an outside expert, not a sub-employee.

A contractor is supposed to be a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis, a contractors business is no different from any other business that provides professional services. A contractor engages in this work knowing that they are exchanging all of their employment rights for better remuneration. This is how I personally manage to get paid anywhere between $200-$500/hour, and the only pe…

You, as an experienced adult contractor, can say this.

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.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#56

Post by fzeroracer »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #49
fzeroracer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you could take the opposite view as well. Yes, if they could treat employees poorly then they would, but they can't so they don't. There is more demand for talent than there is supply of talent. I work at a company that has both contractors and full time employees, and it is very obvious when looking at work product why the contractors are the contractors and the full time employees are the full time employee…

Contractors often work for a business like any other. I've worked with companies where the contractors were better than the employees and vice versa.

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.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#57

Post by munk-a »

frozenport wrote: post #46
blintz wrote: post #17

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,…

No. 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.

If Nintendo isn't viable then video games in general aren't viable - I know that a lot of modern Nintendo games don't really appeal to the HN crowd but classic IP like Mario & Link are some of the most recognizable properties out there... additionally Pokemon and Animal Crossing have dominated the casual game space.

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.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#58

Post by datavirtue »

blintz wrote: post #17

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,…

Enlightening as to possibly why their overall UX is worse than the IRS'.

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#59

Post by wjamesg »

teg4n_ wrote: post #40

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…

I completely agree. Lots of out of touch in this discussion thread. “They are contractors, what do they expect!?”

Re: The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

#60

Post by barry-cotter »

pjerem wrote: post #55
AmericanChopper wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contractor is supposed to be a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis, a contractors business is no different from any other business that provides professional services. A contractor engages in this work knowing that they are exchanging all of their employment rights for better remuneration. This is how I personally manage to get paid anywhere between $200-$500/hour, and the only pe…

You, as an experienced adult contractor, can say this. 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 b…

> Now imagine being a naive post-teenager

Adult. The word you’re looking for is adult.

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