Nintendo’s employee retention rate is 98.9%, surpassing the national average of 70% thanks to factors like brand strength and a strong employee welfare program.
That said, it’s a Japanese company, and Japanese work culture is very different from western work culture (read: a lot more stressful), but they seem to be doing reasonably well vs their peers.
I was trying to look more into game dev crunch at Nintendo and the most recent articles I could find were about Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask (all for the Nintendo 64) and Metroid Prime (for the GameCube). From what I can tell all of their recent games have been delayed instead of forcing crunch.
That being said the difference in work culture means they probably still have longer hours but they aren’t giving their developers actual PTSD like EA and Activision. It is really sad that the bar for AAA game devs is not having devs hospitalized from overworking. Hopefully more game dev and software dev companies can meaningfully unionize to combat that.
I seen a video yesterday about how people in Japan hire people to quit their jobs. The girl said she spent a lot of time being grilled and felt like she owed the boss an apology.
Just out of curiosity, do you have a source for your claims that Nintendo has a bad work environment?
I’d love to learn more about it and verify this claim.
They seem to have really high employee retention:
That said, it’s a Japanese company, and Japanese work culture is very different from western work culture (read: a lot more stressful), but they seem to be doing reasonably well vs their peers.
I was trying to look more into game dev crunch at Nintendo and the most recent articles I could find were about Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask (all for the Nintendo 64) and Metroid Prime (for the GameCube). From what I can tell all of their recent games have been delayed instead of forcing crunch.
That being said the difference in work culture means they probably still have longer hours but they aren’t giving their developers actual PTSD like EA and Activision. It is really sad that the bar for AAA game devs is not having devs hospitalized from overworking. Hopefully more game dev and software dev companies can meaningfully unionize to combat that.
I seen a video yesterday about how people in Japan hire people to quit their jobs. The girl said she spent a lot of time being grilled and felt like she owed the boss an apology.
Not Nintendo, still, I found it interesting.