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.
I worked for a large Japanese manufacturing company. For sure my employer was more old school in a lot of ways simply because it was a big old company. I bet some of the newer industries are less like this. However, I would still be surprised if they were that much better. I had friends in different industries and heard similar stories.
A Japanese citizen sees the full breadth and complexity of the Japanese economy. They would naturally perceive foreign media as oversimplifying and unresponsive to more recent changes. It’s true that Japan (government and industries) are attempting to move away from this style of work but, like many things in Japan, it’s extremely slow, mostly symbolic, and plagued by inertia. Us salarymen clocking in and out was probably implemented with good intentions at first. I never asked but I bet it was enforced at one time. One of the big reasons they’re trying to change is because men that work all day can’t find a wife and have kids. Japan is in a demographics crisis. The cultural xenophobia makes them reluctant to let immigrants in to help with labor shortages. I remember government sponsored dating programs which is funny to think about.
This cultural inertia isn’t all a bad thing btw. It makes institutions very stable. My company had hordes of procedures and burocracy for everything which was inefficient but you could count on them to do what they planned to do. I remember finding out about a government plan to stimulate the economy by giving some money to some companies so they could invest in growth. They had the problem of the companies just giving the money to shareholders in big dividends. They don’t have the expectation of explosive growth like we do in the US.
The thing they really do well though, is soft power. Any time I bring up that Japan is a very racist, sexist, xenophobic, or homophobic society, an army of anime fans and sushi lovers are ready to defend them. Japanese society is complicated and no one person fully fits a generality but I couldn’t keep living there.
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.
