• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Nintendo lays off an undisclosed ammount of employees from North America Division

Draugoth

Gold Member
6be51e0746da0e0301a1070dc05264e9.jpg

According to the Kotaku portal, which was the first to post this information, an unknown number of employees have been dismissed from Nintendo's US division. Following the website's report, Nintendo itself officially confirmed this:

Nintendo of America (NOA) has reorganized its Product Testing functions to drive greater global integration in game development efforts. The changes will also better align NOA with interregional testing procedures and operations.
These changes will involve some contractor assignments ending, as well as the creation of a significant number of new full-time employee positions. For all assignments that are ending, the contractors’ agencies, with NOA’s support, will offer severance packages and provide assistance during their transition.
For those contractor associates who will be leaving us, we are tremendously grateful for the important contributions they’ve made to our business, and we extend our heartfelt thanks for their hard work and service to Nintendo.
Source
 

nush

Member
You know who's been booted. We told them this would happen.



If your contractor fills the test department with contracted gender special drama queens who act like they should be promoted to actual Nintendo employees for simply doing the job they are contracted to do and are not not actual Nintendo employees, and run to the woke journalist press crying about how unfair it is.

93aede217f2a2a632f26a65e66f7c0a0.gif
 

Woopah

Member
First few two pages at Resetera had people actually praising Nintendo for this claiming that it's a good thing. Lol.
Nintendo has been notoriously terrible at treating contractors and there's been a push for Nintendo to make more of them full time.

If they are moving towards having more employees and fewer contractors that may be a good thing long term (while obviously still very bad for those who are not being retained at contractors).
 

Thaedolus

Gold Member
Contracts running out and new FTE positions opening != layoffs. If Nintendo actually were laying off a bunch of people while the Switch continues to print money and while gearing up for Switch 2, that would actually be noteworthy
 

StueyDuck

Member
6be51e0746da0e0301a1070dc05264e9.jpg

According to the Kotaku portal, which was the first to post this information, an unknown number of employees have been dismissed from Nintendo's US division. Following the website's report, Nintendo itself officially confirmed this:




Source
How many have personality hair and septum rings 🤣
 
Being true that there is a clear double standard to everything Nintendo does, this headline is misguiding. The termination of a contract is not the same as a layoff.

Seeing the articles above, it sounds more like dodging a bullet. You don't want those drama queens as permanent employees.
 

ManaByte

Gold Member
To be fair, if the layoffs happened at places like Treehouse? I would agree that it is a good thing. They tend to ruin games with awful slacktivist localizations.
Maybe they found another hooker working there while her cucked husband worked in the coffee shop.
 

sloppyjoe_gamer

Gold Member
Not to sound insensitive, but contractors usually are the ones to go first when companies need to do this, preserving the FTE's instead. This is actually the normal way to do things like this when necessary.
 

tkscz

Member
These changes will involve some contractor assignments ending, as well as the creation of a significant number of new full-time employee positions.

Surprised people missed this line. Sounds like several contractors will be made full time, but if your contract is up, it's up. This is less of a mass layoff and more that a lot of contractor's contracts are up and Kotaku is spinning it, see nush nush 's post above.
 
Such is the nature of contract work.

To be fair, they are converting an uncommonly large number of these contractors to internal "red badges" (NoA salaried employees [see report]). The rest of the group of specific contractors are being let go. Although when you're a contractor, you're not actually terminated by Nintendo, you're terminated by whatever agency employs you. Contract jobs are basically intended to be temporary, but many turn into long-term positions and some are promoted and become internal employees of the company they used to contract for.

For example, Sakurai and his development team are contractors. It's a certain amount of money agreed upon up front, for a certain period of time, that Sakurai agrees to on a project-by-project basis. He is not/ never has been a Nintendo employee.

This business is very cyclical, and thousands of major companies utilize contractors to scale up & down for various projects. Nintendo uses many contract agencies for everything from game development support, to marketing, PR & advertising. It's the norm in business. Across basically all industries.
 
Last edited:

Ozriel

M$FT
You know who's been booted. We told them this would happen.



If your contractor fills the test department with contracted gender special drama queens who act like they should be promoted to actual Nintendo employees for simply doing the job they are contracted to do and are not not actual Nintendo employees, and run to the woke journalist press crying about how unfair it is.

93aede217f2a2a632f26a65e66f7c0a0.gif


While there will always be a difference in perks and packages for full time vs contract staff, There are allegations of sexual harassment, payment below minimum wage and turning a contract staff away from the office clinic after falling down at work and suffering a potential concussion in what you’ve shared.

For people who insist on stratospheric levels of polish in shipping games, some of you seem extremely comfortable with tales of QA workers being mistreated.
 
Last edited:

Solarstrike

Gold Member
Nintendo mad at their employees that they lost billions from emulators. There's no other justification, because their profits have done nothing but increase.
 
Last edited:

kiphalfton

Member
An "unknown number of employees" could be 1 employee or 500 employees.

But of course Kotaku won't substantiate how many employees, because e they're trying to beat their best bud Jason to the punch with this "article".
 
I guess the 50 bucks I paid for Mario vs Donkey Kong on the Switch wasn't enough.
They should have boosted the price to a full 70.
Having played a few levels, If I had known it was a remake of an older 3ds game I would have just bought it used for my 3ds. :(
 

Fbh

Member
I get these articles when we hear about ~1000 (sometimes way more) people getting fired.
But are gaming sites now going to try and make it news every time one of these big corporations with several thousand employees fire any number of people?
 
Free pass studios back at it again. Let's see if this gets the same vitriol as when other specific gaming companies had to do layoffs.

Though if they're contractors, the work could end at any minute so...
 

Shouta

Member
I've worked in their PTD group in the past so I heard about this before the news broke. It's basically that they're restructuring their entire testing division at NOA to go from mainly contractors to FTE.

I hear roughly 50% got converted into FTE. I think their roster is like 150-250 people depending on how busy it is so that gives you an idea.

It's basically something they should have done ages ago considering how many people they cycle through there and it makes way more sense to retain talent with how they do work there.
 
I've worked in their PTD group in the past so I heard about this before the news broke. It's basically that they're restructuring their entire testing division at NOA to go from mainly contractors to FTE.

I hear roughly 50% got converted into FTE. I think their roster is like 150-250 people depending on how busy it is so that gives you an idea.

It's basically something they should have done ages ago considering how many people they cycle through there and it makes way more sense to retain talent with how they do work there.

This will seem bad for all the contractors that didn't make the cut, but it sounds like this is what most contractors have been asking Nintendo to do for a long time. It will probably improve the results too, and reduce churn. Since tech is in a downturn, this is probably the right time for the move from Nintendo's perspective. Good talent available and cheap to bolster their division. This is also a leading indicator that global testing is getting a nice boost, expecting a lot more products in the future that will need testing - and since they are hiring FTE, they are expecting that burden to be sustained over some time. This is NOT just leadup to their next console launch.
 
Top Bottom