Konami's vendetta: A preview into future corporate feudalism?

youtube.com/watch?v=pJawlLSkj7E

Obviously Japan has always been worse than the west in terms of corporate culture and expectations of loyalty, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see these practices start to emerge in the west, considering our surplus of labour. We already know that some construction companies illegally shared blacklists of perceived troublemakers and union agitators in the UK, and I'm sure there are similar stories in the US. Can we expect to see this kind of shit come to us in the West? As the economy is monopolised by giant corporations it wouldn't be that surprising to see them operate on a kind of quid pro quo basis to remove those who aren't obedient drones.

Other urls found in this thread:

reuters.com/article/konami-gambling-japan-idUSL3N0OE18R20140528
asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/The-Konami-exodus
kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Unfortunately yes. Automation will speed up the process.

This. The "professional" classes will be slowly turned into true proles while the former proles will be reduced to precariat style jobs or permanent unemployment.

Is that twitter true?

You forgot the other half of this event, the lead-up, wherein Konami essentially shut down their entire decades-old vidya division (aside from pay2win/mobile/social-shit) in favor of gambling, because of a change in Japan's gambling law:
reuters.com/article/konami-gambling-japan-idUSL3N0OE18R20140528

The reason Konami is being so ruthless to their old employees isn't because they want to rule the roost of vidya, but because they want their old vidya properties as strip mining material for their newly expanded gambling division. This campaign of harassment is just the tail-end of an earlier campaign DURING THE DEVELOPMENT of MGS5, when Konami was attempting to sabotage Kojima and his team while he was still working for them. Kojima in particular is in their gunsights because he repeatedly went overbudget against Konami corporate's beancounters, yet repeatedly earned greater and greater revenues. Also, there are rumors (tying into the increased focus on gambling) that Konami is controlled by the Yakuza.

IMHO the worst trend this saga exemplifies isn't the encroachment of corporate feudalism over us proles (that sucks, but it's not the end of the world). Rather, it's the late-capitalist focus on "core competency" versus "marginal businesses", the insane idea of killing sectors that aren't "profitable 'enough'" in giant corporations lacking any practical limitation on multitasking thanks to nigh-infinite financial leverage. If taken far enough, the entire economy could contract into a handful of high profit industries, not because others are unprofitable, but because they aren't "sufficiently" profitable.

In other words, the exact scenario capitalists use to argue against planned economies, because late capitalism IS a planned economy, just an incredibly schizophrenic and unrestrained one.


What a fag. This is a /lit/erate board, we aren't afraid to read articles:
asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/The-Konami-exodus

I wouldn't put it past them, but it seems like the more likely answer is just that mobile games have blown up in Moonland.

Come to think of it, I'd like to see the spread sheets for a company like Square Enix or Capcom to see how much of their revenue comes from mobile game phonetrash compared to their "traditional" console games. I'd be very, very surprised if the cost/profit ratio wasn't just insane.

They yakuza have their "illegitimate" porky tentacles in pretty much every facet of Japanese society, especially right-wing politics.

You clearly don't work in tech OP

Japan is the west

The move towards gambling actually makes sense since Konami started with a focus on the hardware side of Arcade gaming before it started vidya. Konami also revealed MGS 3 remastered on the Fox Engine on a Pachinko machine. That would indicate to me that along with the focus on gambling that their also making a move back into Arcade hardware, which could be more lucrative in per unit profitability then releasing new titles for next gen and computer systems but idk.

Also one user here made a very good post on the corporate culture in Japan and essentially either you're a lifer employee or you run the risk of ending up a freeter with low pay and no benefits. The vindictive behavior that Konami has shown towards ex-Employees is certainly not unheard of in Japan it is surprisingly normalized.


Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case. It seems that Japanese video game corporations are getting more into gimmicks like this then putting out titles and I think their surprisingly short-sighted perhaps not only due to short-term profit-based thinking but also because of the nationalist bias towards Japan and further exploiting Japanese markets that they aren't seeing that these titles have global appeal. Its a reversal from the time when Japan was forward-thinking in making its path-breaking entertainment culture into global commodity that was part of global culture. Abe took the axe to liberal arts departments in Japan despite the fact that cultural exports and cultural power is also one of Japan's greatest strengths in economic terms. The recent-wave of hate mongering under Abe towards immigrants and right-wing populism may also have caused Japanese culture to increasingly look in-wards.

I love how being "un-PC" really is these days just a smokescreen for being unfunny/uncreative

I love how reddit-spacing really is just a cover for content-less posts these days.

It's a conscious parody of A Wyatt Mann doodles made specifically for enraging weebs on Holla Forums.

….go on

I don't think it's nationalism, I think it's simply moving away from a diverse variable-profit portfolio, to a restricted high-profit one. For instance, guess what Sony's biggest money maker is? Gaming? Electronics? Tech? Consumer products? Nope, LIFE INSURANCE.

Heh, I remember that thread, this is probably the link you're thinking of:
kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

I don't think postmodern critical theory horseshit has contributed particularly to Japanese culture, nor to actual technical skill in the arts.
Japan has never had significant immigration, what has happened is a mere rebuke of attempts by transnational porky to open the borders and flood the labor market (along with hysteria about NEETs, in spite of the fact that Japan's fertility is identical to the US/EU's minus immigration) before Japan's population stabilizes.

...

Man, fuck you, dude. I know I have that picture, so I went looking for that fucking picture on my archive HD and I'm just, fuck, man, it's a barrage of feels over here.

Fuck nostalgia, but still, shit.

Anyway, here's another one. I know that there is at least one more (saved somewhere in this midden pile), and maybe several more. A Wyatt Mann was old hat by this point, so it got parodied to troll weaboos. The racism is exaggerated to needle the Japan is superior! crowd. The file I have saved is circa 10/28/08.

The artist did several other series on Holla Forums I think, but I don't think I have anything else of his work, and come to think of it I never did find out where he moved on to after he apparently left Holla Forums.

iirc

Stop drinking the Holla Forumsyp Kool-Aid liberal arts isn't "post-modern critical bullshit" it existed way before that was even a trend.

Mathematics
I would also add foreign languages to the list.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Does that all look like le post-modern critical theory to you? Is nothing on that list useful to society? I think even if you take the Maoist approach to education Red+STEMlord you really have to be well-studied in history to be a Marxist.

I think its pretty daft to assume that art education has nothing of value that aids the Japanese culture industry or helps to furnish technical skills in the arts. These things help create a literate and culturally sophisticated audience and culture that even those who don't major in liberal arts and go on to achieve success in the culture industries benefit from. They often attend some minimal liberal arts education as part of a well-rounded education.

There's no way to crack-down on liberal arts education without effecting that basic standard of education. The reason right-wing capitalists and the movements they fund are targeting and cracking down liberal arts is because they want workers who are technically proficient in their work but who are otherwise completely uneducated when it comes to culture and society. They want people who are smart enough to run the machines but lack or are diminished in their capacity to criticize society and the culture at large.

As a former liberal arts student, I can tell you that liberal arts doesn't necessarily make one a revolutionary, the vast majority of liberal arts graduates are not radical but it does encourage critical thinking skills. And with the crash and agonizing death-throes of capitalism that is increasingly being discouraged, when times were good rulers would abide this nuisance but increasingly they are reconsidering it as Zizek has pointed out.

For a nation as dependent on arts and culture as Japan is in both economics and global cultural influence what Abe has been doing is economic suicide–but it is understandable, it is a very clear right-wing program of action that has also been put in place in right-wing banana republics in Eastern Europe.

Pic related is the economic value of just the Arts to the US economy and not any other field encompassed by liberal arts education.


I'm not really mad you came from reddit it just looks like hot garbage.

Lets wait for this and the demographic loss to come together for the country to collapse, it will be an example of the evils of capitalism.

The arts are obviously valuable in both an economic and broader sense, heck, I obviously wouldn't be posting in a gaming thread if I didn't think so. Many (though far from all) artistic fields obviously require or benefit greatly from formal training. I would even go so far as to add that formalized intellectual critique and analysis can contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the arts, but such theory as currently exists under the absolute, uncontested domination of pomo crit theory is completely worthless. Until such time as it is liberated from such influence, I would prefer such programs were simply shut down than allowed to compromise the arts.

I'm not a liberal arts major, but I have friends and family who are. Since… Oh, I wanna say around the 1920s liberal arts can be split into two groups:

The latter group, every single one I have read about, been subjected to the "work" of, or had the displeasure to interact with, are without exception utterly despicable individuals.