Nintendo of America is the latest game company to urge employees to work from home, this time after an employee working in its Redmond offices tested positive for the coronavirus.
Notably, Nintendo is allowing staff in Washington and California (two U.S. states that have been hit especially hard by the outbreak) to work from home as a “precautionary step” following the test.
“We have determined that the individual had contact with other employees and we have notified those employees to the situation,” a Nintendo rep told The Hollywood Reporter. “All impacted employees are now self-quarantining, whether they are experiencing symptoms or not.”
This comes more than a week after fellow Washington-based game companies Bungie and Microsoft made a show of rolling out remote work infrastructures and allowing their staff to work from home for an extended period. Around the same time, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that while he wasn’t a big believer in staff working from home, “one unexpected consequence [of the coronavirus outbreak] is a lot of us who are skeptical about remote work are gonna be less skeptical about it.”
Update: An earlier version of this story mistakenly implied that Nintendo of America had instituted this work from home policy in response to the positive coronavirus test, when in fact the company announced it last week.