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A reader suggest that Western games companies should run their business like Japanese publishers, who haven’t needed to lay off anyone.
When it first became clear that something serious was going on with the games industry, in terms of all the layoffs and the change of direction for Xbox and PlayStation, the quote from former Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata, about why he didn’t lay anyone off when things were looking bad for them, got a lot of mileage on the internet.
‘I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world,’ he said, before taking a 50% pay cut and encouraging the rest of the board of directors to cut their own salaries as well.
I don’t need to tell you that this is something that is impossible to imagine any Western company doing – or even PlayStation, who are based in the US. In his business update Phil Spencer spared a whole sentence to vaguely imply that laying off 1,900 developers was a bad thing, while Sony hasn’t said anything at all about the situation.
This week we had the news that Capcom has increased the base salary of all its employees by 25%. While Square Enix went out of its way to say the success of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was due to its dedicated employees, who it had given a 10% rise to in order to stop them from leaving the company. Again, have you ever heard of a major Western company doing anything similar?
I’m not trying to paint Japanese companies as selfless charities, because clearly that’s not true. They have a reputation for demanding long work hours, total loyalty, and poor pay (which is why these raises are needed). Labour laws are also different and as I understand it’s actually very difficult to lay anyone off in Japan (which in itself seems a good thing).
But at the end of the day these developers have not only still got jobs, they’re being paid more for them too. Other than Sony, not one Japanese publisher has announced any layoffs or given any indication anything unusual is going on at the moment.
Even as Microsoft and Sony rip up their decades old playbooks, and pivot to god knows what, Nintendo is so unconcerned they’ve delayed the Switch 2 because they don’t think it’s quite ready yet.
There’s a been a lot of talk about another industry crash, following the one in 1983, but if you look that one up you’ll see that the way it ended was that Japan (and Europe) hadn’t had any problems and so Japanese companies, namely Nintendo and Sega, came in and restarted the whole concept of the games industry.
Obviously a million and one things have changed since then, in terms of the details, but it seems to me that history is still going to repeat itself to a large degree. Or at least it will if American companies learn to act a lot more like their Japanese equivalents.
Apart form not treating your staff like disposable assets the other thing that seems to have allowed Japan to avoid the problems is that their budgets were already generally much lower than Western equivalents. Sony may have spent $315 million on Spider-Man 2 but I’m sure no Japanese developer has ever worked with that sort of budget before, and that’s why they don’t have to lay anyone off at the moment.
If American companies start to go bust, because they’ve pushed the limits of the industry to breaking point, then Japanese companies would be right there to fill in the gaps, but somehow I don’t see it working out quite like that.
However, if American publishers just start relying on one or two massive AAAA games a generation, then there’s still a massive opportunity there for Japanese companies that are making more sensibly budgeted games that can afford to take a risk.
Who knows how things will be in the future but at the moment it seems as if American companies should be looking to Japan for an understanding of how to run their businesses. Or, you know, just act sensibly. It’s not like keeping budgets in check and not treating your staff like trash is some insane formula no one could’ve come up with on their own.
By reader Onibee
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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