Nicalis tiene bastante mala fama entre consumidores por retrasos o desapariciones de juegos como '90s Arcade Racer, que tuvo una campaña de Kickstarter en 2013 y a día de hoy no hay nada de información al respecto.
Varios desarrolladores habían dejado caer también que habían tenido problemas con Nicalis y no era ya ni secreto que habían dejado en la estacada a algunos de ellos, incumpliendo sus compromisos.
Hoy, el bueno de Jason Schreier ha vuelto a publicar uno de sus artículos levantando la alfombra. Esta vez trata sobre Nicalis y, más específicamente, sobre Tyrone Rodríguez, la cara más conocida de la compañía.
Inside The Ghosting, Racism, And Exploitation At Game Publisher Nicalis
Merece la pena leerlo porque hay múltiples ejemplos y Jason Schreier dice en un tuit que ni siquiera son los peores.
El primero en reaccionar ha sido Edmund McMillen, que ya había sido avisado y ha dicho que ha cancelado sus proyectos con Nicalis, como la versión de Switch de Legend of Bum-bo, aunque acabará la última expansión de The Binding of Isaac, Repentance con Nicalis porque está muy cerca del lanzamiento.
I won’t be moving forward with Nicalis when it comes to the port of The Legend of Bum-bo or any console versions of Mewgenics.
[Binding of Isaac: Repentance] will still be releasing as originally planned, the team poured their heart and soul into this DLC and it’s very close to releasing.
Algunas joyas del artículo:
Crooks, Rodriguez, and Devolver marketing boss Nigel Lowrie struck a deal: Nicalis would handle the PlayStation 4 port for Enter the Gungeon when it came out the following year. Crooks and his team had Nicalis sign a non-disclosure agreement and gave them access to their source code for Enter the Gungeon, then went back to work on the game. But soon after that, Crooks and Lowrie both told Kotaku, Rodriguez stopped responding to their calls and emails. Days, weeks, and months went by without a word.
“There was some light correspondence about helping them to get it to compile, then we never heard anything else back regarding the arrangement,” Crooks told Kotaku. “I believe that Devolver prodded them a couple of times, but we never heard anything back. Due to the lack of communication, we were forced to move on, and found another partner to help us with the port.”
Multiple former Nicalis employees said Rodriguez pressured them to drink heavily, made racist jokes in the workplace, and would oscillate between berating them and ignoring them.
Later, in 2016, when Nintendo started recruiting third-party developers for the forthcoming launch of the Switch, Nicalis was one of the first companies to get Switch development kits, according to two people familiar with that process. “They proceeded to order as many of those kits as they possibly could, and acted as a go-between for developers who wanted to get their games on the console early, re-shipping their extra kits to their partners,” said a former Nicalis employee.
With that kind of access and a track record of successful ports, Nicalis became an appealing publisher for independent developers who had made games but couldn’t get companies like Sony and Nintendo to pick up the phone. Problem was, some of those developers told Kotaku, they couldn’t get Nicalis to pick up the phone either, even after signing deals that gave Rodriguez’s company control over the release of their games. One developer who published their game with Nicalis described, in a detailed memo shared with Kotaku, periods of months in which the company wouldn’t respond to their messages, leaving the fate of their game in question multiple times.
seven former Nicalis employees painted a picture of Rodriguez as a boss who wielded his power over staff in exploitative ways. “The level of control he has over his employees is definitely a problem,” said one former staffer. “It was, ‘Anything I tell you to do, you have to do this, because I’m the boss.’” Sometimes that meant employees wasting days or weeks of work because Rodriguez wouldn’t respond to their questions; other times it meant more personal grievances. For example, two former Nicalis employees said they’d be rebuked for taking dinner breaks during crunch hours or taking time off to go to the doctor or take care of sick relatives.
Six former employees who spoke to Kotaku said that he'd pressure them into drinking heavily, ordering shots of gin or vodka and belittling anyone who refused to participate. "He'd order the highest alcohol content shots, push us to drink them, and we'd be hesitant," said one. "He'd be like, 'Come on, don't be a little bitch.'" (This is a phrase we've also seen Rodriguez use in Skype logs and on Twitter.) Several said they'd notice that Rodriguez would hand out shots and drinks but not have much himself, and two former Nicalis employees said they'd seen him get developers drunk before talking about business deals with them.
During one dinner in Japan, according to two people who were there, Rodriguez said he would pay for an employee’s airplane tickets to another country if they drank a disgusting concoction that he’d created at the table, made up of raw eggs, beer, soy sauce, and other assorted food items that Rodriguez had found. Given that Rodriguez owned the company and was responsible for all of their paychecks, Nicalis employees said they felt pressured and uncomfortable during occasions like this. “It’s not very professional… In any other company that’d be a big HR thing,” said one former employee. “But there is no HR at Nicalis, so that went unaccounted for. We were expected to self-report, but you can’t really do that when he’s the one violating HR stuff. Who are we supposed to report to?”
One Skype log shared with Kotaku by a former Nicalis employee shows Rodriguez calling external partners “retards” and his employees “you gays.” In another Skype exchange shown to Kotaku, an employee talks about watching Star Trek and Rodriguez says, of Jean Luc-Picard, “I like that nigger.” Two other former Nicalis employees said that Rodriguez would, as a goof, encourage one employee to use the n-word in Skype group chats. Said a third, when I asked: “I haven’t experienced anything like Tyrone demanding people use racial slurs, but he likes to say ‘white is right’ often in a ‘jokey’ way.”
Kotaku obtained a number of Skype logs from the Nicalis group chat in which Rodriguez communicates with employees. The logs are filled with racist, antisemitic, and homophobic language from the Nicalis founder. Here are some excerpts:
One former Nicalis employee, who was overweight and suffered from health issues, said that Rodriguez would make comments on his weight and often told him to go for walks. (This employee requested anonymity but was willing to publicize these specific details, even knowing they might make him identifiable to Nicalis, because he felt it was important.) During a business trip to Japan, the former Nicalis employee said that he’d been walking around so much that his inner thighs began bleeding, and he wanted to rest in his hotel. When Tyrone Rodriguez and his brother, Nicalis CEO Victor Rodriguez, asked him to go on a trip to a nearby landmark, the former employee said he refused. “Tyrone started saying things like, ‘Who do you think paid for your trip?’” he said. “He was essentially trying to coerce me into going… I said, ‘No, I’m not going.’” Soon afterwards, he said, Rodriguez fired him. “When we got back from Japan I feel like that might have been why they got rid of me. Because I stood up for myself.”
Lo de quitar a la gente de los créditos de los juegos, que ya se había comentado anteriormente:
Other former Nicalis employees have told similar stories about being rebuked or punished for refusing to go on trips with Tyrone Rodriguez. Three former employees said that Nicalis removed them or people they worked with from the credits of their games once they left the company. “Tyrone can be very generous and a really good guy,” said one. “If he needs something from you. But I’ve seen him turn pretty quickly when you’re not needed anymore.”
Mismanagement at Nicalis has also cost external developers like the people behind Enter the Gungeon a lot of time. A second independent developer, The Game Bakers, shared another ghosting story with Kotaku. In 2017 they wanted to port their boss-battling gauntlet game Furi to Switch, and started talking to Nicalis about putting together a port as quickly as possible. It was important to strike early; they knew that within the next year or two, the Switch eShop would be oversaturated with indie games and that getting noticed would be tough.
“We sent the project, they evaluated the cost, sent a first contract draft that we sent back with changes,” said The Game Bakers co-founder Audrey Leprince in an email. “But then they started ghosting us. Not answering emails, Skype calls. We waited three weeks, tried to contact them several times… Finally they answered that they were sorry and would send us a mail the next week. Time passed. We were going at E3 (they were there), offered to see them there. We reminded them how acting fast was important. So eventually we sent a message saying the deal was off considering the communication breakdown.”
In February of 2018, the makers of the platformer Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap said on Twitter that they had submitted a Switch patch to Nicalis but been ignored. (Rodriguez publicly denied this, saying he hadn’t received any emails from them.) Earlier this month, the developer of a Game Boy-styled platformer called Save Me, Mr. Tako told a similar story, writing on Twitter that he’d submitted a new patch for his game that added an easy mode and fixed some of players’ complaints. “But it’s up to Nicalis to decide when it will come out,” he wrote. “It’s ready, and I guess it will come out on Steam first. Really hope it will be soon because it’s frustrating to see people complaining about issues I fixed a while back.” In response, Rodriguez wrote on Twitter that Tako hadn’t sold well enough to justify implementing the patch. “Unfortunately, the game did not yet make back what we put into it,” he said. “We have a policy of stringent QA testing before pushing releases, and we do not have the space in our budget to QA test the patch so we can push it out.” Similar controversies have swirled around previous Nicalis-published games like La Mulana, whose Wii version Nicalis canceled after a long period of silence, and the crowd-funded ‘90s Arcade Racer, which has been MIA for years.
