The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade

I suppose this is run-of-the-mill for the video game industry, but man, it&#x27;s sounds so hellish; people deserve not be humiliated like this at work.<p>Isn&#x27;t the solution unions, akin to the heavily unionized movie &#x2F; 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&#x27;ll be incentivized to make things slightly better.

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&#x27;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 seemingly forgot all of the things that made the Wii great in the first place. Then they fixed it with the Switch, identifying the disappointment that people felt with the Wii U and streamlining the product to really dig in to consumer trends. It&#x27;s a lot of ups and downs, and that&#x27;s without even touching on their software and handheld history.<p>It&#x27;s got me wondering what&#x27;s up at Nintendo. Their mainstay studios like HAL Laboratories and MercurySteam haven&#x27;t changed all that much over the years, and their presentation quality and infatuation with design has yet to waver. Overall, I&#x27;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&#x27;s developers and engineers deliver a polished product for all kinds of consumers, but I struggle to imagine how they&#x27;re going to continue to adapt to the market. Especially if they&#x27;re continuing to merge their handheld and home console markets, I worry they could turn this Switch success into another Wii U moment.<p>Time will tell, but Nintendo&#x27;s got quite a tumultuous history with some exceptional highs and dumbfounding lows.

You can see this in their offerings. They are consistently 10+ years behind the times in terms of multiplayer and online. That they are still so popular is a credit to how divorced from reality multi national corporate mega giants can be and still succeed. Their games and online offerings, for the most part, frankly suck compared to their competitors. They are alive purely on the strength of the 5% of good games they put out by rehashing the same 3 franchises over and over and over and over.

To be real honest, without doing any research, I already assumed working for NOA would be miserable.

We were a Nintendo family when I was a kid (back when that was a meaningful distinction and cross-platform games were very rare) and I continued buying Nintendo systems and games up until the Gamecube era. But at some point I came to a realization and haven&#x27;t bought anything of theirs since.<p>Nintendo doesn&#x27;t take good care of their customers.<p>There&#x27;s the confusing half-step hardware upgrades which can potentially leave you with hardware that doesn&#x27;t technically play the latest games, or has compatibility problems. There&#x27;s the bizarre hoops you have to jump through to play games with friends online.<p>But the biggest thing that stops me from buying any new Nintendo platform is that it&#x27;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&#x27;t know how it works on Sony&#x27;s systems, but I imagine that it&#x27;s similar. My account is credited with the game, and I can play it when I want to.<p>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&#x27;t just tell the service &quot;Account X is my friend,&quot; I&#x27;m just gobsmacked.<p>This article makes the case that this attitude of contempt extends to their own employees as well. I think they&#x27;d do quite well to eat some humble pie, but I&#x27;m not expecting much.

This is using Nintendo to talk about an industry-wide problem. In essence, tech companies use contracted labor to skirt around minimum standards for employment and the law lets them get away with it.

Isn’t this the reality inside any large companies in America?<p>Contractors will always live in a different world than full timers. It sucks, but that’s what it is.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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 trying to prevent exactly what Nintendo is doing which is using contractors as discount full time employees. The tax payer is subsidizing Nintendo because these people end up on unemployment for two months every year.

&gt; Contractors increasingly see themselves as second-class citizens<p>This made me laugh<p>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&#x27;t have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches?<p>Most people have jobs without those perks. Does the fact that you do work for a company &quot;in tech&quot; make it worse that you&#x27;re not showered with benefits? The margins aren&#x27;t high and the work they are doing can be done by almost anyone.