- A Tokyo-based game studio is giving employees two days off to play a much-anticipated new game.
- Called
Elden Ring , the game was created by Game of Thrones authorGeorge R.R. Martin .
Employees at a game studio in Japan are getting two days off to play one of the most highly anticipated games of the year.
Pocket Pair, a Tokyo-based studio behind the survival game Craftopia, told employees they could have Friday and Monday off to play Elden Ring, the much-hyped new game created by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.
All Pocket Pair employees will get an "Elden holiday," the company wrote on Twitter. Pocket Pair also posted a photo of the company's president and wrote that he "can't wait for the Elden vacation," according to a translation from Japanese.
—ポケットペア公式 - Craftopia/クラフトピア (@PocketpairJapan) February 24, 2022
Elden Ring, announced in 2019, is an open-world role-playing game created by Martin and legendary game designer Hidetaka Miyazaki. The studio that developed the game,
The game became available Friday for Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5, and PC, but it appears players are already running into performance issues. Game publisher Bandai Namco apologized to players and said it would work on improving some frame rate issues experienced by PC users.
Still, reviewers are already calling Elden Ring a masterpiece, and before the game had even launched, it already had more than 700,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, breaking viewing records for the studio. As of Friday morning, roughly 730,000 viewers had flocked to Twitch streams to watch the game in action.
Now, as Pocket Pair employees enjoy their four-day weekend playing Elden Ring, they'll become part of what looks like an emerging trend in the game industry: giving workers time off ahead of a big release. Last March, VR studio Mark-On told its workers to take a three-day weekend to play Monster Hunter Rise, although the time off didn't apply to top executives, according to Kotaku.