How Japan has avoided the gaming industry’s persistent layoffs

10 comments

1. Probably employment laws that benefit an employee from not losing their job easily?

2. Isn’t it because everything is outsourced? They don’t layoff the main ones they just don’t renew the contracts of the others.

3. When salaries are so low increasing them by 30% doesn’t put a dent in the budget you start understanding how it’s easy not have layoffs.

   When you have overworking cheap labor, you’re happy to keep them since those assets are hard to find.

   >“12 hour days, 6 days a week” at Rockstar Lincoln. “I heard a lot of staff [at Q-Games] complain about overtime, the hours, and expectation [of work],” he says, “never really from Japanese staff, because they were used to it, but certainly from other foreign staff.”

   People are used to being workslaves. Just look at the entry salary in big game companies here, working at uniqlo is a better opportunity…

4. Tango just literally closed down last month.

5. They never went on a hiring spree?

6. I have friends working at one of the biggest game companies in Japan and I was told they were bamboozled with mandatory paycuts and no more work from home earlier this year. They were hired right after the pandemic so part of their work arrangements was x days of the week work from home and x days in the office. Many had moved to Tokyo from overseas so they felt kind of trapped.

7. It hasn’t. They use temp workers and never “hire” them.

8. How many times this article going to get recycled. Its VERY hard to fire anyone in Japan due to rights of employees. They would can those worms the moment they got a chance if they could. I can bet a ton of contract employees were not renewed but that isn’t a lay off so you wont see that here either.

9. Japanese game devs were slow, like much of Japanese culture, to adopt to modern trends of western games.

   In this sense, they never leaned hard on micro transaction based massive multilayer titles.

   Did they miss out on a lot of money? Sure, but they also didn’t have to hire massive headcount to accommodate a new business model.

   I’d say it worked out in their favor in the seemingly long term but hindsight is always 2020.

   Who knows what the future holds.

10. Instead of layoffs some studios just close down. Was quite sad when Xuse and Illusion did.