I guess DJ was kind of right about Reggie all along...

[A Black Falcon]

https://venturebeat.com/2022/05/13/the-d...fils-aime/

Reggie Fils-Aime has been doing a lot of press recently, saying a lot of things.  Some of them are good, some interesting stories about when he was head of NoA.

But then, there's this: Reggie likes NFTs, and wishes he could NFT monetize his Animal Crossing island.

NO

[Dark Jaguar]

I KNEW IT! I knew... no, no I can't take credit for this at all.  I'm glad he's out at this point.  Kudos on him for getting Wii Sports packed into Wiis, but heck that wasn't even an original idea.  No we can thank Howard Phillips for that, and how he pioneered including not one but two games with every NES, as well as every peripheral needed, and then in Nintendo Power doing everything he could to kick off the RPG craze in the US by sending out a free copy of Dragon Warrior to every subscriber.

Anyway, Reggie's only exposed himself as being a businessman, who may be savvy in some ways but here is just embarrassingly exposing overreaching greed.  The bottom already fell out of NFTs and he's going on about how Animal Crossing should have them?  Bleck...

Here's something far more damning, and that's the workplace environment of Nintendo of America being bad enough they want to unionize.  That all happened under Reggie's watch.  Doug Bowser takes some blame, but Reggie let it all happen or even actively created those conditions.  I say "or" because as much as I praise Howard Phillips as "my" NOA president, we don't know how far back it goes.  Testimony from employees who worked for Nintendo during the 80's and 90's do seem pretty positive overall, so maybe it was different then?

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I think you've got it there -- it is clear that Reggie's just a marketing guy and always was.  They did a great job of selling him as this cool and tough Nintendo guy, but that was obviously just PR.

With that said, I never was a huge Reggie fan -- I'm definitely not the target audience for that 'cool and tough' pitch, to say the least -- but I thought he was alright.  This is a lot worse...

Though yes, I should have also mentioned the workplace issues around how contractors were treated at NoA particulalry in the last decade or so.  It sounds like it wasn't very good.  People who were full employees were mostly fine, but the contractors, clearly not as much.  Reggie denies any knowledge of issues, but that doesn't seem very likely, I'd think.

So yeah, not great.  The thing is though, remember that for the most part Reggie was just a figurehead, a marketing guy there to sell Nintendo of Japan's decisions to America.  The independent NoA of the '80s and '90s was destroyed by Iwata (along with the departures of its leaders) and Reggie was the guy he brought in to be a clear subordinate without prior knowledge of the industry and implement NoA's new focus only on marketing and localization.  He mostly did fine at that, I just overall think that the more independent NoA of the '90s was for the most part better.

On the consumer side though, while the loss of independence for NoA has clearly hurt in some ways, compare the network of Western developers Nintendo had on the N64 and to a lesser extent the GC to the entirely indie-focused effort they have now (though the insane volume of indie games on Switch is overwhelming, in both good and bad ways), the last few years -- post-Reggie, the Doug Bowser years -- have been the best ever from Nintendo in one respect, localizations!  Until the Wii years, and after to some extent, it was of course the norm for some major titles to only release in Japan, but now we're even getting Famicom Detective Club!  It's pretty nice.

But seriously, Nintendo needs to clean up their act and deal with their contractor problem, that is totally unacceptable.

[Dark Jaguar]

The focus on indie developers was championed by Dan Adelman.  That guy did wonders for Nintendo's shift in focus and in helping to eliminate some rather terrible royalty practices during the Wii days.

Contractors...  Now that's a thorny issue.  So thorny...

You see, right now companies across every industry are using "contract labor" as a workaround to actually giving employees due compensation.  They're setting up contracts for people who still end up working exclusively for them most of the year.  That's NOT what contract labor is for.  Contract labor, chiefly, was intended for people who do one-off jobs.  You know, like construction workers and the like.  It was not ever intended as a substitute arrangement for long term exclusive employment, but as worker rights get fought for, more and more often people are being hired as "contract workers" for things like secretary work and so on, where they're expected to come in and clock in every day at the office.

That, I believe is ENTIRELY the case here.  These aren't people hired to poor concrete once and then it's off to their next great adventure.  These are long term employees who should NEVER have been hired as contract workers in the first place.  I believe this because if it was a one off thing, they wouldn't be organizing to form a union around Nintendo's treatment of them specifically.  The very fact that it's contract workers doing this shows that NOA is in the wrong in at least the way they hired them in the first place.

Queue "No one's putting a gun to their head" excuses...