 Across the video game industry, we've been seeing a number of layoffs, really dating all the way back to the COVID days, but especially since then as the market re-corrects itself and people are not staying at home as often and back to their full-time positions, working in office or working, you know, various different positions, people just don't have the same amount of free time. Even those that still work at home might be working more now than maybe they were back then. Reality is that the video game industry has been in a bit of a decline. Now it's not only just because of a declining market a little bit or at least a shifting market, it also has to do with, let's just be honest, a lot of overspending by a lot of these companies inflating AAA game budgets to insane places. Now for the most part, we haven't really talked about that at this channel because it hasn't necessarily impacted things directly with Nintendo, but a story is broke today and Nintendo has commented on it, admitting that there are some changes happening at Nintendo pretty much leading into Switch 2. These changes are happening currently, they're happening right now and obviously they impact a little bit of what Nintendo is planning or at least restructuring the company in some sort of way leading into this new system. Now it's going to obviously sound bad and for anyone who's losing their job today or has been informed they're going to be losing their job, I do feel for you, but I also want to note that not all of the news is necessarily bad and actually is a bit of a spin of a positive on an older Nintendo story. So we're going to go over and head to Kotaku who has the news on this and look they have the comments from Nintendo as well. So we see here that a big shake up at Nintendo testing center ahead of Nintendo Switch 2 just posted 48 minutes ago. When you come out here it says Nintendo of America is restructuring the small army of contractors that helps test its games and hardware at its Washington state headquarters. That's right this is their big QA group they have at Nintendo of America. Really it does most of the testing for their games. Anyways the result is a massive downsizing that comes amid layoffs across the rest of the video game industry after the Mario maker reportedly delayed the launch of Nintendo Switch 2 successor until 2025. Now one thing I want to note is when someone says massive that is a term that requires context that unfortunately we're not given. Let's say that they have 5,000 people that work in QA testing I'm not saying they do Nintendo doesn't even have that many employees across their entire company but I'm just saying let's say they did well a hundred people being laid off which is what we're gonna get into wouldn't necessarily be considered massive. So there's a little bit of lack of context here but let's dive into the rest of the story. So it says these changes will involve some contractor assignments ending as well as the creation of significant this is important significant number of new full-time positions a spokesperson for Nintendo told Kotaku in an email contractors at Nintendo of America who feel undervalued and underpaid which is a story we covered years ago have a long call on the company to make them full-time red badge employees instead of exploiting loopholes in the seasonal work requirements while some of them are now finally getting converted to direct hires others including testers with over 10 years experience are getting the boot though Nintendo says everyone impacted will receive severance packages now this is important because they don't necessarily always have to offer severance packages Nintendo is offering it and the positive here is Nintendo has decided that we're going to create more full-time positions to bring some of these testers in a full-time capacity what that means are they still going to be product testing that's obviously what we don't know this sounds like a restructuring of maybe Nintendo's entire product testing department I don't know obviously all the inner workings here but if you remember Doug Bowser when he addressed all the controversy that came up earlier about the poor work conditions for the QA testers he promised there would be changes and you know sometimes those changes might involve laying people off we obviously don't know all the particulars of why this decision was made but if it was made in wake of making people more full-time employees possibly there's actually a positive spin here but we have to wait and see how this plays out now Nintendo did drop an actual statement here because they were contacted and here's what Nintendo provided to kataku Nintendo of America has reorganized its product testing functions to drive greater global integration in game development efforts the changes will also better align Nintendo of America with inter regional testing procedures and operations these changes will involve some contractor assignments ending as well as the creation of a significant number of new full-time employee positions for all assignments that are ending the contractors agencies with Nintendo of America support will offer severance packages and provide assistance during their transition that means to a new job for those contractors associates who will be leaving us we are tremendously grateful for the important contributions they made to our business and we extend our heartfelt thanks to the hard work and service to Nintendo now kataku goes on to note that it's not immediately clear how many total employees will be let go or not have their contracts renewed according to for current and former employees the restructuring could affect over 100 contractors but again they're probably guessing of course it doesn't look like there's actually a real number here and most of those being converted to full-time status appear to be getting moved out of software testing now again these are according to for current and former employees we don't actually know this would be the first mass layoff at nintendo since even larger scale cuts across competitors in the console space like sony and microsoft earlier this year microsoft just cut 1900 jobs in the most recent news though it doesn't appear to impact any existing full-time employees the shift does come due in a recent lull in nintendo of america's testing department three contractors told kataku so adding some context from behind the scenes there has been no lull in the testing department so maybe a lack of games needing tested which would fall in line with the fact there hasn't really been a ton of games announced past june right so maybe there is a reason they just don't need as many people right now they said there have been no new major first-party games in the testing pipeline and none of them were aware of anyone having hands on time with the upcoming switch to despite previous hopes it would arrive as early as the second half of 2024 they also weren't sure how nintendo america could continue to test massive games like last year's the legend is on the tears of the kingdom which was praised for his technical performance and lack of bugs with the new cuts nintendo declined to comment on the status of its testing pipeline so we're gonna kind of end there because that's really the brux of the news and what we really learned from this is a few things one nintendo is restructuring their entire testing department which probably needed to be done in wake of some of the bad negative things we heard in the past and what's also come out of this is that nintendo it basically had a bunch of workers not doing anything because they didn't have any games coming to be tested i think some of the fears that oh how could we test a major game like tears of the kingdom if we do these layoffs might be a little premature because you self admitted or at least these certain employees did these sources that nintendo doesn't have anything for you to do right now in the first place it's pretty natural for a company if you have a bunch of employees without anything to do you're probably gonna lay some employees off because you're not gonna spend a bunch of money for you guys to sit around and do nothing so i think that this may be being overblown because we've seen so many massive layoffs across the industry and i know i'm a nintendo youtube channel so it's gonna come across like i'm defending the corporate greedy nintendo but if the employees own words from people still working there literally said we have no major games that we're working on well if that's the case then you probably aren't needed at the moment and that's just kind of what happens i'll put it another way i'm obviously a content creator who mostly works completely by myself but i do occasionally hire temporary employees temporary contractors to make thumbnails maybe help with editing videos or help with channel redesigns and all that stuff well let's say that instead i had a contract employee who was working with me let's say it was my best friend eric and eric was working with me as an editor but let's say something happens and now for a long period of time the next six months let's say my video pipeline is going to be cut in half and we're gonna have half as much content as we usually do along with no major big video projects chances are i don't need eric anymore at that point and to keep him employed with me would just be me giving away money that i'm not getting a return on that investment from now you might go well that makes you a greedy corporate shill and i get it eric would be my best friend and it would be a little complicated there but the entire point is that hey he's probably not gonna expect me to keep paying him to come in every day sit at this desk right here that you guys can't see right below me and just not work i don't think that would be a realistic expectation for him and if i can't find a way to relocate him to do other things that can help out i probably would have to let him go so from nintendo's perspective and the employees self-admitting they don't really even have work right now i kind of understand what nintendo is doing now the answer is well what happens when they do have major games that need some testing and all of that well what do you think is going to happen nintendo will just hire more people that's how these contract positions usually work what's left out of this of course is that these are contract positions and you only contract people when you need them it sounds like nintendo's maybe ending some of these contracts early hence the severance packages but they also converted a bunch of people to full time which is exactly what they were asking for so i don't honestly think that this is really as big of a deal as maybe the initial story is making it out to be or making it sound i think the full context looks like this is just normal business practice and hey some employees got exactly what they wanted which was promotions to full-time positions working directly for nintendo and no longer for these contract companies and who knows maybe nintendo's restructuring in general and they're gonna have product testing spread more throughout the whole company and not just here you know like they self-admitted that hey they're not aware of anyone that's been product testing switch two things for nintendo yeah because they probably have a team of qa testers maybe closer to their maybe just directly in japan who are the product testers on their switch two games why well because product testing in the united states is also shown that game leaks tend to come out of product testing in the us and when you have a switch two in a brand new system maybe you keep most of those game testing internal over in japan so that's just one of those things that could be happening as well but whatever the case maybe uh i do feel for any of the people that go i know i produce this at 100 and that was just a guess they don't really know it could be less than 100 people because you got to know the exact number of people being promoted how many people are being let go how many people might be shifting to other projects so this just seems like something in my opinion that's a little minor but still noteworthy just because nintendo hasn't had um a round of layoffs really at all and the fact that they're offering severance and everything lets you know that yeah this is obviously a bigger number than you know just like one employee or like a couple employees choosing to leave nintendo uh and it's also notable that again none of their full-time employees are affected so they're not going after like hey nintendo hey we're doing bad financially we need to completely downsize our company and just let go of a bunch of full-time employees this is affecting a specific area of nintendo where you're already a temporary employee some of you might have been you're getting your contract renewed for 10 years and i can understand some frustration there but that is why they created more full-time positions and unfortunately you're probably not going to have enough full-time positions for everyone that was probably an unrealistic ask so i don't know i think that this is probably okay i'm glad nintendo is at least offering severance and whatever services they plan to offer to help them get new jobs i don't really know too much i've been offered severance once and then it was yanked for me i don't want to get into that situation because it was pretty bad and hopefully that's not what happens here anyways guys thank you so much for tuning in let me know your thoughts in the story down below maybe you think this is a bigger deal than i do i think it's a big enough deal for this video i just don't know that it's the biggest of big deals but maybe i've just been bouncing around different jobs most of my adult life enough to kind of move on when situations come up that maybe lead to you being laid off thank you guys so much for tuning in and i'll catch you in the next video