Badmouthing your employer and its customer base is rarely a good idea, especially when you do it in a public forum, but that is exactly what (former) Nintendo Co Ltd employee Chris Pranger did earlier this month.

Pranger worked in Nintendo of America’s Treehouse localization division for several years, right up until his August 3rd appearance on the Part Time Gamers podcast. During the podcast, Pranger talked about the complaints some fans make when some of the Nintendo games released in Japan are not localized elsewhere.

“They just say the classic, ‘Why do you hate money? Why do you hate money, Nintendo?’,” Pranger said on the podcast. “And it’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ We’re trying to make… obviously it has to make calculated risks, but at the same time, one of those risks… and I mean they’ll bring up games that are very Japanese games, like Captain Rainbow for instance.”

“They’ll bring that up like, ‘Look how many people want this. Don’t you want money?'” he continued. “And we’ll be like, ‘Yeah, we do want money, which is why we know it’s a colossal waste if we ever try to localise that in this current market, because look at you people. You don’t make up a big enough group.'”

Pranger then elaborated on the costs associated with localizing games compared to the revenue they generate outside of their originally intended market. “People don’t like finding out that their fanbase is actually too small to justify the costs of the thing they want,” he said.

Within a week after his appearance on the podcast, Pranger was terminated from his position at Nintendo, and he wrote a heartfelt (and heartbreaking) announcement on his Facebook page.

“Hello friends and family,” he wrote. “As many of you have probably seen, I am no longer at Nintendo. I was terminated this week due to a podcast appearance I made last Monday. It was a stupid judgment call on my part and ultimately it cost me far more than I could have imagined.”

Pranger went on to describe his childhood of being teased as “Nintendo boy,” how his singular goal to work for the company drove him through school, and how he now fears that he will be unable to support his family.

“I’m so sorry to everyone,” he concluded. “I’ve failed you. You believed in me and supported me and trusted me and I’ve failed you. I’ve failed me.”

photo credit: smcgee via photopin cc