14 DAY TRIAL // Not the entire world is suing Tecmo, but things are just as bad, anyway because all the 300 employees of the development company have filed a lawsuit over unpaid wages for roughly 100 hours of overtime work per month (yes, as strange as it might seem, this means a bit over 3 extra hours of work, per day!)
Tecmo is the company behind successful series like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden and only recently esteemed developer Tomonobu Itagaki left the company and sued it for various reasons (click here to read the story). Nobody was expecting, though, the storm that was going to happen.
As reported by website Kotaku, two Tecmo employees have filed the suit with the Tokyo District Court, demanding 8.3 million yen ($77,000) in payment for their unpaid overtime work. The lawsuit filling reads that, back in 2004, the company illegally moved the workers to a "flexible hours" work scheme and, from that time on, no overtime has ever been paid. The plaintiffs in the case now officially represent all 300 Tecmo employees and allege that, as said earlier, overtime exceeded 100 hours per month, all unpaid.
What does this mean? It means that Tecmo is in very, very big trouble. Probably the sum it would have to pay (if it is to lose the lawsuit) would not be big enough to dissolve the company - we're talking about $23 million here - but it is definitely something that's not going to help its image as a fair, honest company at all. Especially because the suit even claims that Tecmo has created false documents and intentionally covered up accounting documents. So, things are awful and we're extremely curious to see how this problem will be solved and what will happen to the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden series.