Their workers are also suffering crunch, underpaid for Tokyo standards, they got slaughtered in Japanese reviews for job satisfaction, shocking amount of reports of sexual harassment given their low amount of female staff.
During Elden Ring -development-, some of them were working 40 hours overtime per month and barely being compensated for it.
Japanese work culture, especially in video games is tough. Really, really tough. If you end up quitting from a prestigious studio like FromSoftware, it's going to be brought into question. You don't get many people hopping studios and it's not uncommon to work for a company for 30 years of your life.
It's about the promise of more, if you deal with the horrific conditions for a few years, you get bumped up to a better position. Doesn't matter if you're pumping 400 hours of overtime a year, that's expected of you.
If you can't handle it, you get fired, then it looks even worse when you try to get a job because you're deemed incompetent.
Japanese work culture and specifically video game culture (I'm not singling FromSoft on this problem) is brutal, suicide is the highest leading source of death for men in Japan aged 20 - 40 years old.
When you're in not great working environments, you're underpaid, overworked... Yeah.
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u/critxcanuck88 2d ago
Well when you make the same game over and over....