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by kabdib
4782 days ago
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A cow-orker of mine interviewed there a couple of years ago. He said it was pretty bad, too. One of his standard questions (he's kind of a snarky guy:) "How many of your co-workers should be fired?" He generally gets answers in the range of ten percent. At Nintendo, they were saying "fifty percent." Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad. |
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I dunno. The issue here seems more one of culture-shock than right- or wrong-styles.
I think the problem is that people see "game company" and they think "wacky-and-crazy-everybody-chillin'-in-t-shirts-and-playing-foosball-while-shooting-nerf-guns-at-the-boss-woohoo-caffeine!" American-style game company.
Nintendo isn't like that, and never has been. They're a large Japanese company, and one which has always been sort of conservative and traditional (even by comparison with other Japanese companies).
If you want to work for a wacky-foosball company, then I suppose Nintendo probably isn't for you, but it's pretty clear that good games can be made under either model. Whatever the opinion of some EA dev on the wii-u, and regardless of how "good" the wii-u is, Nintendo has had more influence on the gaming world than EA ever will.
Even the accusation of "bureaucracy" in the original post, which while certainly true—Nintendo is a large company, and large companies tend towards the bureaucratic—seems a bit off the mark. I don't think it's an issue of bureaucracy, I think it's an issue of culture.
I also think first impressions can be somewhat deceiving. I work for a very large Japanese company, which is crazy bureaucratic, and while this can be very annoying, there's also a lot of loyalty and flexibility at the small team level. That sort of thing is hard to see from outside.