didn't konami get aired out a while ago for demoralizing shit like making you clean the gym when they got mad at you? no wonder they don't make games anymore bc who tf who want to work in place like that?
Yeah, at least one instance of a programmer or designer being demoted to janitor. I do think though that Konami's "recent" decay has been vastly overstated*, when I listened to the interview of the guy who did the translation for MGS1 (an American working for Konami in a completely unrelated field formerly), you got the impression it was already a pretty tightly controlled affair even in the late nineties, bordering on suffocating. Maybe Konami was or has become worse but we all know that's pretty par for the course for a lot of those big japanese videogames companies (and the industry at large, outside of the japanese peculiarities, is not much better) even if they're at the bottom of that spectrum. The fear of developers being poached was already the rationale for not crediting people by name in the early years, or so I've read.
* We've seen all over the japanese industry the same struggling with the bloating of AAA budgets and requirements, the loss of diversity and most of the catalog being shelved in favor of only the safest projects, the same exodus to mobile or pachinko, the same rush to promote some internal big names/devs to keep it afloat and often the same subsequent burning of said stars.
