Nintendo Fires Employee For Speaking About Job On a Podcast

An anonymous reader writes: You may not have heard of Chris Pranger before, but he's one of the localizers that works to bring Nintendo games over to the west. He recently talked about the localization process for a small podcast, providing Nintendo fans some details about how games make it from Japan to the western world. Nintendo's response to the fan interest in the game localizing process? They fired him, of course. It's unclear what statements in specific Nintendo objected to and Nintendo, so far, hasn't explained its decision.

Comments

This doesn't seem unusual.

[Sowelu]

Most places I've been at have a VERY strict policy of not talking to the media or representing the company in any way without permission (usually only PR or execs can do it). If you want people to follow the policy, you have to enforce it, even for the little things.

Re:This doesn't seem unusual.

[Dutch Gun]

It's not unusual at all. I've worked in the videogame industry for many years. You simply don't talk to the public or media about projects you're working on - ever. We all sign NDA agreements which prohibit us from talking about *anything*. I can't even *name* the current project I'm working on, let alone discuss details. I've written official company blogs about the games I've worked on, but they were reviewed by editors, legal, community managers, PR, and so on before being published. When you're sinking ten to a hundred million dollars into a AAA title, a company wants to be incredibly careful about the message being sent out. This developer was part of that world, and unfortunately didn't understand that.

There's a great temptation to talk to media, because people are interested in what happens behind the scenes of some of their favorite videogames. It's a bit of an ego boost to think that people want to listen to what you have to say. It's unfortunate that Nintendo felt the need to fire him instead of giving him a reprimand, but I suppose that's their policy.

Just recently we saw how an ill-conceive blog from an Oracle manager made the entire company look really bad. You can understand why people who aren't trained to talk to the public or the media shouldn't be attempting it on their own. Things are bound to slip our that you didn't really want to say.