Topic: Nintendo’s Dream Image vs. Inside Reality?

For us as fans, Nintendo has always been about fun, nostalgia, and creativity. On the outside, it feels almost like a dream company.
But according to an in-depth report by IGN, things look different behind the scenes. Nintendo of America kept a lot of its customer support staff on 11-month contracts, asking them to take breaks before rehiring so they wouldn’t become full employees. Some of these contractors stayed for years, doing essential work, but never got the stability of a direct role. Now many are being let go, and some are even training their replacements in South America before they leave.
As consumers, it makes me wonder. We see a brand that means so much to us, but for the people working inside, the picture might not be as bright. Should that matter when we choose how much importance and support to give Nintendo in our lives? Imho yes we should, and they’ll them loudly.

Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-customer-support-concer...

I'm critical of Nintendo these days, but when it comes to things like this, it's easy to end up in a situation of holding companies to levels of standards that are unattainable. Is there any major corporation with this many products to support that does support in a better way?

Another angle is the contrast in support between regions. Here in Norway, there is no Nintendo support. It's handled by an intermediary (Bergsala), which is Swedish, and has almost no power whatsoever. They function as a middle-man between Nintendo's offices in Germany and us. So from my point of view, Nintendo's support has been abysmal my entire life, despite me loving their products. It's been a stark contrast even to Microsoft, who with the Xbox 360 had local support that would come and physically repair devices suffering from RROD, as an example. I never owned one but my roommate at the time did, and that was a surprisingly positive experience.

Obviously them treating their contractors unfairly is a separate moral dilemma, but then again, that's also one of the points of contractors: Easier to hire, easier to fire. They charge a lot more per hour than a full-time employee in exchange for that. As long as what they're doing is within the law, is it worse than what I presume every other corporation does? How much does it impact you as a customer?

@OmnitronVariant As a customer, a company’s ethics matter a lot to me. If I’m not convinced, I stick to the bare minimum (or theoretically zero if they need to be boycotted for example if they support wars). If I find them fair, I’m willing to support them a bit more. Otherwise, for video games I might look at other platforms in the future, like itch.io (though I still need to check more), if they really treat internal people and developers fairly.

Then we're pretty much on the same page and I do the same. For example, one of the reasons I am reducing expenditure on products by Nintendo now is because I believe they've joined the industry "AAA" standard of using game design that's unethical — inspired more by gambling than to entertain on its own merits. I doubt many agree but that's one of my personal subjective "lines in the sand" for personal and general ethical reasons. Many publishers and developers share the boat with Nintendo on that, and have sat in it for far longer. Epic Games would be one, Ubisoft and EA two others.

I think most of us would be pretty disappointed if we knew the inner workings of the big companies. Even the "happy" ones on the outside. You just don't get that big without having some ruthlessness.

Small companies? Sure, maybe. But the good ones don't stay small for long. And then the inevitable kicks in.

Most of us support horrible companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo etc. They all have horrible histories. It seems the more horrible a company is the better they do. Most electronic products in the world are made in countries with poor human rights records and for the very lowest price. If these companies were ethical the products would probably cost twice as much or more and then we would all moan about that. The world economy seems to be balancing on a knife edge with economic collapse not far away. The US is never going to be able to pay back its debts as is the case for many other indebted countries. It's great to be moral about your purchases but there are far greater horrors in the world than people not having proper job contracts. You only have to visit an abattoir to see horrors on another scale.

@BonzoBanana I just thought for a moment, if the world were really ethical, games could be so much more beautiful and creative. I think the games and their stories would feel way better.

@Ultra128 Nintendo has a reputation as being one of the best companies to work for in Japan, but considering Japan also has a reputation for not great corporate work environments, it's all relative.

As for customer support being laid off... it's sad and depressing but that is definitely going to be an area where AI causes a lot of jobs to be lost.

@FishyS The closest thing to a silver lining to this situation is that they're transferring those jobs to actual people (albeit cheaper contracts in Latin America) instead of handing them to AI.

@FishyS AI customer support doesn’t work so I don’t see that happening. Sure they might try for a bit until they get sued for not providing functional customer support.