Nintendo accused of miscrediting external developers

Nintendo has been accused of miscrediting external translators, according to employees working for service providers Localsoft and Keywords.

Speaking to Game Developer, the sources claimed that Nintendo failed to properly credit their work on titles including Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

They also alleged that Nintendo has a "policy to not list the name of translators from external agencies in their game credits, which also forbids [them] from listing those titles on [their] CVs."

Prior to publication, Game Developer reached out to Nintendo, Keywords, and Localsoft but did not receive comment.

One source said they were always credited when working at Nintendo, but recalled one instance where even in-house testers were reportedly not credited for a Professor Layton title.

"Nintendo of Europe handled the localisation and publishing for the Layton series at the time," they said. "The [in-house] translators on that project protested strongly against this decision, but in the end the testers were not credited for this project. I don't know if this has since become policy."

After the source left Nintendo, they worked on projects for the firm as a contractor for Localsoft and Keywords. They alleged that they have not been credited for their work on Nintendo titles during that time.

Another source who worked at Localsoft claimed external translators were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, which prohibited them from talking about their work on these projects.

"If you look at the credits for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, for instance, you will notice only six people were credited for localising a full title that's available in eight languages," the source said. "[In my experience] a game like this would normally be localised by a team of around 25 translators. Some languages are skipped over completely like they got magically added to the game.

"For games like Animal Crossing or Breath of the Wild you don't really notice that 15 or 20 translators are not in the credits, as there are all the other names from their in-house translators, which is why Nintendo's policy of miscrediting might have flown under the radar. But almost every big title that Nintendo releases which uses external translators actually fails to credit translators."

Nintendo has previously been accused of miscrediting employees. Last year, Metroid Prime Remastered was criticised for omitting the game's original developers from its credits.

Last March, the GamesIndustry.biz Academy dived deeper into the issues behind why developers are being miscredited and what can be done to resolve it.