Japanese company gives staff holiday to play ‘Elden Ring’

Pocketpair, the studio behind Palworld, has given staff a paid holiday today (February 25) so they can stay at home and play Elden Ring.

FromSoftware’s open-world action role-playing game is out today and according to Pocketpair’s CEO Takruo Mizobe, he believes staff will be “unable to focus on work”.

The company announced the “Elden Holiday” in a company wide email, which was later shared on Twitter.

ポケットペアは、全社員対象者にエルデン休暇を支給します！
エルデの王は金、月は出勤する必要はありません！ pic.twitter.com/HforPa0TkN

— ポケットペア公式 – Craftopia/クラフトピア (@PocketpairJapan) February 22, 2022

Rumour has it that the Dragon Quest series is so popular in Japan, that developer Square Enix now releases its games on Saturdays to prevent kids from skipping school and adults from calling in sick to work to play the game.

And last year, Japanese tech developer Mark-On Ltd announced a ‘Monster Hunter Holiday’ for all non-executive employees to coincide with the launch of Monster Hunter Rise after CEO Masaki Hiyama received an overwhelming number of holiday requests for that day.

Elden Ring launched earlier today. Steam reviews for the PC version of the game are currently “mixed” due to performance issues and missing features. 

Bandai Namco has since released a post about the issues in Elden Ring, stating that it is “constantly working to improve the game so that it can be played comfortably on various PC environments and platforms.”

In a five-star review of the game NME wrote: “Trying to summarise all of Elden Ring‘s successes, trying to pinpoint why it feels so special, is a gargantuan task. There’s a sublime open-world, and FromSoftware has made some incredibly innovative changes to its difficulty, but that’s not quite it.”

“Yes, there’s now an accessible plot and yes, the boss fights could rank as some of FromSoftware’s best. But that’s still not it. Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s masterpiece not because of any one improvement, but because it’s a towering sum of its parts. It’s been tens of hours since I first stepped foot into the Lands Between, and I still can’t quite believe how monumentally it delivers.”