 For many of us, working at Nintendo sounds like the dream job. Current Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser has insisted, as we noted in a recent video on delays, that the company has a responsibility to care for its workers, saying, quote, We need to make sure that our employees have a good work-life balance. Reports from current and former workers at Nintendo of America, though, suggest that life at the company is not as much fun as Bowser would have us believe. Among the many accusations levied against Nintendo are claims that the company is withholding permanent employment from its staff, increasing workloads for those who are employed, and even firing workers who publicly discuss unionisation. Nintendo of America denies these reports, but a brief look at the company's glass door reviews suggest that these issues are widespread enough that a significant portion of the workforce feel disgruntled and under pressure. Meanwhile, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fesame has been quick to decry the accusations stating, quote, The reports I hear really strike me as just not the company I knew. What's being described does not seem like a healthy culture. Complaints frequently reference Nintendo's two-tiered working environment. Permanent employees wear red or gold Nintendo badges and have unfettered access to the on-site cafe, enjoy an annual bonus each year, and are invited to social events. The rest of the workers at Nintendo of America are blue badge wearing temporary contractors, hired for an 11-month period with a forced break of two months in between each contract. This break in the contract gives Nintendo the legal right to deny temporary workers the employment benefits afforded to others. According to IGN, the words second-class citizens are regularly used to describe employees who carry a blue badge instead of a red or gold badge, and they frequently feel unwelcome even setting foot in Nintendo's glittering headquarters to travelling groups through the main lobby or staying too long in Cafe Mario. One temporary worker, Jelena Zamonga, described to Kotaku a time when this rigid system negatively impacted her health. It was an icy day in an unusually snowy January when she says she slipped and hit her head while walking to work. She didn't think anything of it at first, but by the time she was in the office she had trouble reading and started to worry she'd suffered a concussion. Fortunately, there was an on-site clinic in her building, but when she went to visit for a check-up she says they turned her away because she wasn't a full-time employee and wasn't part of the Nintendo health insurance plan. She decided to ask a co-worker to drive her to a nearby urgent care facility instead. That didn't work either. The colleague was a full-time Nintendo employee. Since as a contract hired, Zamonga was technically employed by Parker staffing, she said she was told it was against company policy for her colleague to drive her off-site. Another worker, Jen, spoke to IGN about the pressure she felt as a temporary worker with mounting responsibilities but no benefits. Toward the end, I was managing a team of 13 people during a product launch, acting as a chat lead, publishing knowledge-base articles on Wi-Fi for not just We but WeU and Switch, she says. I was doing forum moderation and was a forum lead at that point and had written documentation for it. On top of that, I was still expected to take chats and take calls, and I was looking around wondering, why am I not a red badge? Jen noted that, as a transgender woman, even being allowed to participate in Nintendo's contingent of a Pride Parade was a hard sell. She said, My manager at the time actually asked about it and took it to a fight with upper management. And that is the only time I've ever seen where workers were allowed to mingle with employees was the Pride Parade, because he had fought for it and he had fought for that hard, apparently. Apparently, things are also becoming more stressful for full-time employees. An anonymous source told IGN, It just seemed like the full-time staff were almost drowning all the time. They didn't hire enough full-time people, so full-time people just ended up managing more and more contractors, getting more and more bogged down, and there was this bottleneck. That's how contractors ended up training each other, because the full-time staff is just buried. Workers' comments suggest that this attitude within Nintendo of America is partially a legacy issue, one of the quirks of being the western arm of a rigid, old Japanese company. Reggie Fisame said that when he was first interviewed for a position within Nintendo, he asked the head of human resources about upskilling and upward mobility within the company. He said, And his answer to me was, Reggie, we don't do that here. I'm taken aback and he continues, Japanese parent, our parent doesn't believe in this. Therefore we don't implement it. That said, Workers have noted that things have been getting worse since around halfway through the 2010s, at a time of upheaval for Nintendo. Apparently, the culture began to shift following the poor performance of the Wii U, the loss of President Satoru Iwata, and the departure of Reggie Fisame. Said Fisame, In the end, I judge my legacy by that when I retired, as well as the head of HR who I had that initial lunch with, he and I retired the same day, and as we retired, we promoted people internally into a variety of different roles versus bringing people in from the outside. To me, that was a testament that we had done a great job of improving and growing the culture at Nintendo of America. Reports suggest that current Nintendo workers do not feel that the culture within the company is quite as healthy now as Fisame remembers. While issues of this nature are often nuanced, and we don't know all the details and should be careful about jumping to conclusions, it doesn't sound like working at Nintendo is quite the dream job that many people imagine it to be. According to a report by Axios Gaming, an internal memo from Doug Bowser claims that the higher-ups within the company are reflecting on the situation. Bowser is quoted as saying, Like many of you, the executive leadership team and I find many of these points troubling, and we are closely reviewing the content. Nintendo has zero tolerance for inappropriate conduct, including harassment, discrimination, or intimidation. Axios notes that at least one source said the message was disappointing, as it didn't actually address the issue surrounding contractors. Nintendo's full response to this scandal has yet to be revealed, and it remains to be seen what moves the company will take as a result of complaints. For the most part, though, there is one thing that contractors at Nintendo continue to praise about the experience of working for the company, the staff themselves. Glassdoor reviews and IGN's report alike make it clear that the people who actually work for the company are lovely, and do their best to support each other even in the midst of a challenging environment. The problem is not the people themselves, but the systems that create undue pressure by discriminating between workers in an often arbitrary manner. Perhaps the moral of the story is that a good or bad system of management can make all the difference for the people who are trapped in any social environment.