I am actually not too surprised about NoA. I had heard for quite some time that Nintendo Japan called all the shots, and keeps a short leash. As an employee for a company with a foreign home office, I know the story all too well. We only work on and can bid of jobs that the mother company is unable to. We're in manufacturing though.

I thought the problem with NoA was that they had too much autonomy, not that they had too little...

From my (very limited) understanding Nintendo of America was mostly only responsible for marketing and third party relations in North America; and they're (more or less) just a business satellite.

My thought was that they had a free hand in deciding what titles to localize, and had a limited capacity to form publisher/developer partnerships (like with Monster Games for ExciteTruck/ExciteBots), and that NoE was the one that was really slaved to NCL

lol yup, that sounds like Nintendo.

After reading this i feel like the industry deseves the financial pressure its getting, though i doubt they will learn the right lesson from it.

It's kind of hard to believe most of this.

About SCEA:

"Complete lack of communication from Japan about company changes, product development...their employees find out from the media."

This explains that PSOne classics on Vita incident perfectly. o.O'

Basically sounds like everyone in the games industry has a culture problem of crunch-time, inefficiency and general mismanagement. This is obviously a bit exaggerated but it's not that surprising to read, especially after some of the recent work scandals (LA Noire & Team Bondi anyone?).

Well, everyone except Valve who sound like employment nirvana.

I would wonder if the Valve folks who work on the Steam service are as happy. I think the distinction here is that Valve gets to let their employees roam free, allowing them to produce the very best or most original of their own ideas, because they have a stable revenue stream, and so the Steam folks are the breadwinners while everyone else gets to create (and thus Valve games are almost universally good, since they get all the tlc they deserve). Similar to Google, where you probably have the Google Ads and Analytics people a little more frazzled than everyone else, because their results bolster the rest of the company, allowing the others to take more leisure.