I've heard plenty of horror stories, from the game producers themselves, about staff living at the office for weeks/months at a time during Super Metroid development.
I don't know if that really means anything in japan. Loyalty to one job is different than it is here. Do we have comparison to other Japanese companies?
I'm genuinely sure Aonuma mentioned at some point that near the end of development for BOTW his team went into an overdrive mode, but I guess it wasn't so terrible that it went into a legitimate enough crunch period for anyone to make note of it. Though apparently the way they cycle the staff through different procedures ensures a healthy mindset that prevents burn out.
Yeah. I think thats YouTube info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzxi9IcO-u4
I remember a specific reference from Itoi during the development of Earthbound where he and Iwata would often stay overnight to finish off production and slept in Yamauchi's office. Though I guess he looks upon that more fondly than a regular worker would.
I would take that with a big pinch of salt. The amount of times I've been told be a developer that they don't crunch/do overtime when they actually do.
What more do you want? We have executives stating that their employee's health are very important and a focus within the company, indicators that working hours are flexible and well within norms of 'normal' full time hours and a company willing to delay games over extensive crunch.
No one has said they don't do any crunch. Their philosophy is to do as little as possible. It also appears it may be a voluntary as employees have flexibility in their schedules.
In another Iwata Asks, an employee recalled being scolded by Miyamoto for staying late and urging the late employee to get out of office and not waste his youth overworking.
This isn't true. The source, which is Nintendo's recruitment page, merely lists the contracted work hours. If you go to any Japanese developers recruitment page, it will more or less be similar to Nintendo's, yet overtime is an everyday occurrence in the industry in Japan. People at the video game company I briefly worked at in Tokyo, for example, averaged at least 40-60 hours of overtime per month. Nintendo is known as being better than most of the industry in Japan, but they certainly do have overtime. If you can read Japanese, most job-hunting sites and the Japanese-equivalents to Glassdoor (Vorkers and jobtalk) list overtime at Nintendo as an average of 30+ hours per month. Vorkers and jobtalk, compared to Glassdoor, have a good reputation for being pretty accurate to boot. The evaluations of all the companies I worked at in Japan were accurately represented on both those sites (including the above which had 40-60 hours of overtime per month).
