Disgaea RPG Studio Nippon Ichi in Financial Trouble, Withholding Salaries...
23 replies, posted
https://www.dualshockers.com/disgaea-nis-financial-trouble
According to reports from various Japanese news outlets, Nippon Ichi Software is in dire financial straits. The development and publishing company has been suffering for quite some time due to poor sales of their titles in Japan. And now it seems, due to debilitating issues surrounding their latest mobile title Disgaea RPG, NIS can no longer afford to pay their employees.
I hope that they can stay afloat, they are the makers of some classics like the Disgaea series, Labyrinth of Refrain, Phantom Brave, Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger, etc.
Too bad it's NIS instead of NISA that's struggling. If it were NISA then it'd actually be deserved since they're a garbage company who doesn't give two shits about releasing anything remotely resembling quality.
The point at which you don't pay your employees for the work they've done is the point your company dies.
Or at least, when it deserves to die. If you can only stay afloat by exploiting labor... You don't deserve the privilege of staying afloat.
Or maybe the people at that company love their work that much? It doesn't have to be as dramatic as you make it. NIS is pretty prolific.
People love financial security more than they love giving their labor away for free.
Don't forget that NIS is a Japanese company which has a very different work culture than the west does. There's a lot more Japanese workers than western workers who would be willing to work for free, at least for a bit, if their company was struggling.
While I don't exactly want to see NIS go the way of the dodo, that's one net positive: NISA can't really exist if NIS goes down since they wouldn't exactly have more shit to ruin at that point or a parent company to keep them afloat. Though that also means that NISA's employees would spread out across the industry.
That's not a good thing though, is it?
One would argue the company has an ethical (if not legal) obligation not to exploit people for free labor, even if the exploited people don't realize what's wrong with it.
I look at Japan's work culture as an example of what never to do.
I don't know about that, NISA publish games by others companies too like SNK, Falcom and Kadokawa, even if Nippon Ichi disappear they can survive without them.
goddammit
I never suggested it was or wasn't? I was only addressing your claim that nobody would work without pay which is simply not actually the case as shitty as that may be.
I never said they wouldn't do it, I said it was unethical for the company to ask them to.
NISA is still a subsidiary of NIS, if something happens to NIS they're at the very least going to have trouble.
Disgaea RPG was ForwardWorks fault for that really bad launch
That's not remotely how your post came across.
Literally the only impression given in this post is that people wouldn't work for free. Ethics isn't even hinted at here.
Game development in general is known for some pretty brutal crunch hours too. Wasn't it Masahiro Sakurai who said near the end of Smash Ultimate's production he had literally been on an IV drip while working? Game development generally encourages workaholics, often to the detriment of said workers' financial, medical, and psychological wellbeing; let's not forget Bioware's infamous "stress casualties" IE employees who were being worked so hard they had breakdowns.
There's a difference between the two? I thought NIISA was just the american division of the company
NIS America is a subsidiary of Nippon Ichi, they publish games developed by their parent company and others like Gust, Falcom , SNK, Kadokawa, and some time ago they also publish games by companies like Atlus and Idea Factory. They even have license some anime series like Toradora and Love Live to America.
NISA localizations are infamous thanks to be pretty bad, and I am not only talking about the quality of the translations, they have managed to add bugs a issues that the original games don't have.
Nippon Ichi made a lot of good games on the PS2-PSP-PS3 years, the Disgaea series, La Pucelle, Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, Phantom Brave, etc., but they started to struggle on 2014-2015 when their games started to flop and their employees leave to others companies. Some of them leave for Idea Factory/Compile Heart and thanks to that and some issues about the localizations of the Neptunia games broke the relationship between the two companies, leaving Nippon Ichi on a worse condition. They started to recover thanks to the Disgaea 5 ports and Labyrinth of Refrain, but their others games flopped so hard that now they are on life support.
Don't isolate his posts. He's right, financial security is much more important than giving free labor. It is true that there are stories of employees willingly go to work without pay (see: Gigantic), but they SHOULDN'T be expected. The company's in hot water, and if employees are demanded to overwork and starve for a chance to survive, the company be damned, then.
Not all that surprised tbh, NIS's ports and remasters are as good as how NISA localized them. Case in point, this shit isn't fixed:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1360975036
Hopefully Sega can buy them and they can finally shut down NISA
Their port of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is still a total mess. And this is after a huge enough stink got kicked up over it that they spent an additional six months or so completely redoing the localization and trying to hammer out some of the bugs. Meanwhile if NISA hadn't gotten the contract for this game and Xseed did instead like they usually do for Ys localizations it would have taken longer and might have initially been released with bugs but they would have actually been fixed up in the long run.
Ys VIII was such a total shit show that if Falcom ever tries to use NISA again for a port that I'm going to have to pass on the game despite the fact that I have all Ys games released on pc thus far. (Including several on both Gog and Steam.) For 90% of my play through of the game I had to repeat most of the game's cutscenes at least twice because it would crash the first time. To my knowledge this still sporadically happens to people. And there were a couple areas in the game where shaders were somehow corrupted and tanked performance and occasionally caused crashes. This one was fixed to my knowledge but it took months for it to happen. And they still haven't released the release they claimed to be working on for the other issues as far as I'm aware despite it having been almost a year now since the last update. (June 29th of last year.)
Er, I'm not isolating anything? Up to the point I had replied to him, he didn't actually say or really even hint at ethics at all here? Up to that point the only other post he had even made was one about how if a company can't afford to pay its employees then it should go out of business. Which I didn't respond to because I don't necessarily disagree with it and it had little to do with the one I did respond to.
And workaholics can be a serious issue in Japan too due to the culture. That's why I was saying it wasn't terribly unlikely that their employees might be willing to work without pay for awhile. To my knowledge Japanese game developers tend to be a fair bit more invested in the studio they're a part of than western developers. (Which is saying a lot since a lot of western developers do get fairly invested in the studios they're a part of.)
https://wccftech.com/nis-staff-affected-by-layoffs/
Apparently NISA is also affected by this
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