Rumor: Konami has become a "police state"
According to the Japanese online resource Nikkei, the everyday life of Konami employees resembles an Orwellian dystopia.
In 2010, Konami, which had previously only made games for consoles and PCs, launched the Dragon Collection mobile game. The cost of developing the project was lower than for large projects of the company, and the profit was relatively high. Konami gradually switched to mobile projects.
After that, according to Nikkei, the working conditions in the company have changed:
- Kojima Productions studio, the developer of the Metal Gear series, was renamed the Production Department No. 8 (Number 8 Production Department). Employees’ computers are not connected to the Internet, communication is carried out only by internal messages;
- Konami employees do not have their own permanent email address. Personal E-mail is available only in those departments that work with people “outside the company”. This is the marketing and sales department. The rest receive a random address every couple of months: it is randomly generated from letters and a numeric code;
- employees are given a certain time for a lunch break. The duration is controlled with the help of personal cards. The names of those who were delayed at lunch are announced over the speakerphone;
- surveillance systems are installed in the company’s corridors. They are used to track the movements of employees.
Finally, the company demotes employees who work “insufficiently efficiently”. Game designers, artists and producers become security guards, cleaners in the company’s gyms or workers in the production of slot machines.
Nekkei’s words are confirmed by another Japanese publication, Asahi News. In 2013, it published an interview with a former Konami employee. He was a mobile game developer. After he was “demoted”, he had to work at a factory for the manufacture of “patinko” submachine guns.
Let’s add that recently the authors of Metal Gear, Castlevania and Silent Hill declared the transition to mobile officially. In May 2015, the president of Konami stated that “mobile devices will be the main platform for the company.”
A source: http://kotaku.com
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