Nintendo Of America Restructuring Testing Department, Over 100 Contractor Jobs Reportedly Eliminated

Contract positions are timed (even if they are renewed) so this isn’t the same as a massive internal lay off. So this is work as usual in the US. The good thing is some people are gonna get full time internal positions out of this. (I am saying this with the assumption that they are full time contractors for solely Nintendo. Obviously for a person with multiple clients that may not be for the best.)

…no major first-party games in the "testing pipeline"

Uh oh!

I tested the Animal Crossing: Welcome Amiibo update for them years ago and it was such an unprofessional ***** show I'm surprised there haven't been lawsuits by now.

All original game development teams are cut. Going forward we’re just doing remasters.

Contractors can indeed be temporary. It’s possible Nintendo are dressing this up a little but it’s not comparable to what’s been happening at other big firms. I imagine the short-term gigs are drying up a bit temporarily due to the transition from Switch to Switch 2.

I’m no expert in the biz but if I were at Nintendo, and there’s an upcoming new console and nothing revealed as of yet? I’d be tempted to lock that down and keep testing completely in-house.

Side point: who is Gach and why do we listen to them?

@SpaceboyScreams Were the working conditions terrible or what exactly was the ***** show?

@BTB20
Probably the fact they had to play Amibo Festival.

rimshot

Edit: I can’t read

@arabiansanchez Senior reporter at Kotaku (says it in the source link NL provides)

Here's the thing about contracting...whatever company those contractors work for will just move them on to another contract.

I have been a contractor for...holy cow...17 years now and I have yet to ever go without a paycheck even with contracts going away - I simply filled an opening elsewhere.

@arabiansanchez This is my thought, too. A big pool of testers would probably make it harder to prevent or track a leak if one happened--they're cleaning house so they can limit who sees what Switch 2 games and when.

@BTB20 It's a long list, top item being the culture we're all sick of hearing about in other companies by now; my girlfriend and I quit when nothing was done about something that was happening to her, blatantly, on full display for weeks, and we weren't even the first people to report it. The sanitation was horrific, there were weird stains and very bad smells everywhere from the carpet to the chairs as if a janitor hadn't been in the area for years. The 3DS units we had to work with were disgusting and falling apart and the keyboards were even worse. It was such a sad little office and they put up mangled old posters of Mario characters that were probably an attempt to make you feel cool about working there but ultimately just made the atmosphere more of a joke, I sat next to two crumpled halves of a Toad poster put together crudely with a crooked strip of tape. Management would play their political podcasts on high volume while everyone worked and if you asked them to turn it down they had all sorts of idiotic responses like "work your way up to management and you can play whatever you'd like" or "you should be paying attention to this". They shut and locked the doors the second the clock hit 8am and anyone who was literally even a second late for any reason missed the whole day and got a strike, three of which would get you fired, and other penalties included "referencing other games or series that you're not working on" even if you said something like "nice Zelda shirt" to someone in the break room which would result in getting called into a meeting with a manager and having a 15 minute conversation about how you're putting their security in jeapordy.
It was cool during lunch walking over to the main Nintendo building's cafeteria next door but the contrast in quality made going back to your cubicle all the more sad. The nicer building had big statues, happy employees, clean everything. It was like we didn't belong there.
I could go on.

Not to dismiss the issues those contractors might have without that Nintendo money, but considering some of what's come out about contractors there, this seems like its perhaps for the best for all involved tbh.

I used to work, multiple times, as a tester at NOA. They would let you go via a phone call on your way home back then. This is nothing new.

@SpaceboyScreams I don’t think you were a contractor, I think you were a prisoner. Only half joking.😢

I don’t have a clue what to make of this. It could be horrifying, totally normal, not terrible, anything. I’d need to be more in tune with what actually goes on within Nintendo, and as they are not particularly public with what they do behind closed doors, I shall have to live in ignorance for the time being.

Which I can deal with, life be miserable enough as it is, I can survive not having another bubble burst

@SpaceboyScreams Do you have any proof that you did that?

@SpaceboyScreams Good grief that sounds horrible if all of that is true. I really hope that things are better now and if not, that the news in this article MAKES things better.

Geez, I bet so many kids thought being a game tester at Nintendo would be the coolest thing ever. I sure did back then so hearing this is kind of heart breaking. I'm sorry to hear you had such a rough time there!

@GarlicGuzzler You're confusing the term quality tester in this instance. The contracts that Nintendo chose not to renew, and the employees that Nintendo are converting to full time employees likely weren't reviewing games coming into the eShop for anything close to the Nintendo Seal of Quality, either the original definition that it won't crash or damage the hardware, or the perceived definition that it is a enjoyable quality game.

These employees were likely doing bug testing and the like for Nintendo's first and second party games, and not the mass flood of eShop titles.

@Yosher Being a tester anywhere isn't good. And that's a well documented fact at this point. Your job is purely to fill a spreadsheet at the end of the day that may or may not be ignored while replying parts of games over and over and over.

On another note, this reported seems familiar. Is this the one who talked about pirating Metroid Dread before release that got Kotaku blacklisted?

One thing that’s unclear to me: Which of Nintendo’s games are primarily being tested in the US? Is testing tied to the location where a game is developed? Do they spread it evenly all around the globe? Is NOA only testing English localizations?

Would be interesting. Maybe this only indicates that NOA is even less involved in game creation at this time. Because with Switch 2 on the horizon there’s no way Nintendo has no "major first-party games" in the "testing pipeline".

@Haruki_NLI Honestly I had no idea, I never heard of such a thing. Well aside from product testing on animals, but you know. A shame to hear it's treated in such a way. I'd be ashamed if my company worked like that tbh.

@arabiansanchez another wielder of Credible Sources that was lumped together with an official statement on the topic to appear under the post's "news" tag?😏

To all the game testers out there: Thank you for your hard and important work!

It was a pleasure to buy the physical copy of Princess Peach Showtime! day one without having to download a day one patch. I had no problems with the game. Keep up the great work.

@GarlicGuzzler These are play testers for Nintendo's games.

@SpaceboyScreams That sounds ridiculous but I'm not surprised.

@GarlicGuzzler as others have said. These are play testers for Nintendo’s own output and maybe some second and third party partnerships and publishing deals.

Nothing to do with the eShop. It’s down to the individual studios to play test their own games and do their own QA. Sometimes a publisher will also provide that service.

@nhSnork Ooh smart. The corporate intrigue of journalism 😝 I always roll my eyes at ‘claims’.

@NintendoWife NST still makes games, but not as much as before. I think they made the remake of Mario vs Donkey Kong.

@SpaceboyScreams I spent a couple of years working with a big third party publisher as a QA tester and this was my experience too, bar the treatment your partner was subjected to. Though that was present for others.

I enjoyed "working in the gaming industry" while I was there but I never looked back once I got a decent job with good hours, pay and conditions. QA tester in gaming is not an appealing job.

there's been a "lull" in the testing department in recent times - with supposedly no "major first-party games" in the "testing pipeline".

Well Switch 2 ain't coming any time soon then.

@GarlicGuzzler You absolutely are. The QA testers were responsible for testing the localized versions of Nintendo developed titles. Not just random eShop games, or even ones that Nintendo only published.

@SpaceboyScreams There has been lawsuits.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402344/nintendo-nlrb-complaint-settlement-aston-carter

Contractors are always treated like second class citizens it seems.

@GarlicGuzzler I think it's QA for Nintendo published games, not games submitted to the Eshop.

@SpaceboyScreams It sounds like you were there long ago. I was there in 2017, and it wasn't like this. It did look like it was straight from 1990, I actually appreciated the historical element to it. It looked like it was frozen in time from the NES days, except with brand new computers. The 3DS capture PC was indeed a pain to work with. The Switch capture method was an absolute dream. I left at the end of 2017 and was back briefly in 2018, and wow, it was a different place. It had completely remodeled, with bright lighting, very low cubicle walls so anyone could have a stand-up meeting, desks that could rise if you wanted to work while standing, and a 2 monitor setup at every station (this started in 2017, but at 75% of the PCs.) The culture was much better in 2018, everything was like night and day.