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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.
I know a lot of us like to blame people for their own problems, but in this case he knows it's his own fault—which, to me, makes the whole situation even more sad and awful. I feel really bad for him, and I hope he can find a way to come back from this.
From TFA:
Building Better Software
Pretty much all that's holding them afloat is exclusivity for the NES era intellectual property, which they keep re-hashing over and over and over again and their die-hard fans (of which there are a lot) keep buying.
Kind of a wonder how well them and a lot of other Japanese based games developers are holding out. Japan used to be the source of some very good games, especially during the late 80s and 90s, but over the last decade especially they've been crap. That is to say, companies like Square, Konami, Capcom, etc, haven't put out any good games in a LONG time.
This is a company disciplinary issue. You damn well better apply it consistently or you open yourself up to all sorts of grief.
Your examples are stupid. Disney's policy is that they only license under certain condtions, and that is their right. And they are 100% correct that if they relax those conditions for one group, other groups are going to demand the same thing, something which they do not want to provide. Universal did give the school permission to use their characters for free, but do you have any evidence that any other school approached Universal for the same terms and was refused? If not, then that would explain the lack of lawsuits, wouldn't it?
Yes, cops let people speed a little. However, they let EVERYONE speed a little.
Yes, businesses let people leave early. However, they let EVERYONE leave early.
They eked out profits in the N64 and Gamecube generations despite generally poor sales by keeping unit costs down and managing good first party sales.
They basically won the lottery with the Wii - between the quick-fix appeal of Wii-Sports, a very friendly media narrative (portraying them as the plucky underdog) and some well timed first party exclusives in the first 2-3 years of its lifespan, they made an unfeasible amount of money, most of which they banked.
Since then, their luck has run out and their output has generally disappointed. From the last 2-3 years of the Wii's life-span, through the Wii-U's launch and into the present, their gaming activities have generally been loss-making (sometimes startlingly so). However, they've been doing a lot of currency trading on the side, which has meant that some years/quarters they have shown an overall profit based on that. Just as pre-bailout General Motors was sometimes described as a pension fund that made some cars on the side, Nintendo has somewhat become a currency-trading house that makes a few games on the side. For the time being, they aren't going anywhere (and the Amiibo range has given their gaming revenues a boost, though this looks set to be temporary).
The longer term future for the company is more clouded. They've been able to sit on the takings from the early part of the Wii generation for a long time, at least in part because they've been paying out very small dividends to shareholders. The longer term risk is that shareholders will start to wonder what exactly is going on with the management of a company that is sat on a huge pile of cash, but not particularly good at earning more of it.
Shareholder revolts are generally rare in Japan (which hasn't really had a true Eisner-moment yet), but there are already signs of discontent coming out of reports of their shareholder conference calls. Their hesitant move into the mobile gaming market is almost certainly a reluctant sop to shareholder pressure.
When I became a lead tester at Atari (formerly Infogrames) in 2001, I specialized in Nintendo Gameboy Advanced and GameCube titles for the job security, as none of the other lead testers would touch Nintendo. No wonder. Microsoft and Sony have published standards, but you pretty much have to guess the Nintendo standards as that info was proprietary. It was a constant game of cat-and-mouse in figuring out what Nintendo wanted. I was very good at it. Nine out of the ten titles I tested over three years were Nintendo.
I'm so sorry to everyone. I've failed you. You believed in me and supported me and trusted me and I've failed you. I've failed me.
Looks like after working a long time with the Japanese, the guy handles guilt the way the Japanese do.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...