Nintendo has likely made its employees very comfortable, because it’s announced that the bottom salary for its employees in Japan is getting a big boost. The move comes at a time when the sport industry is in a shaky state, which makes Nintendo’s acknowledgment of its employees much more impressive.
Nintendo, like other console manufacturers, is feeling a pinch straight away. The demand for RAM and other hardware is high, but supplies are low as firms like Micron pivot to selling only to AI firms. Because of this of costs for parts rising, the worth of the Nintendo Switch 2 goes up, just like the increases which have been impacting the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X lines of consoles.
Nintendo Gives Back to Its Employees
The president of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, announced the rise in pay at Nintendo’s latest annual shareholder meeting. An investor noted that Nintendo doesn’t have a labor union, and desired to know what the corporate is doing to reward its employees. Furukawa responded that he feels it is important for Nintendo to keep up an “appropriate level” of salary and compensation. Accordingly, the bottom salary at Nintendo Japan is being increased by a formidable 10%. It’s kind of of fine news for the industry and game developers because the industry as an entire struggles with myriads of layoffs and the entire shutdown of several game studios.
Unfortunately, it’s turn out to be common to see game developers laid off following the discharge of games, even after they’ve been successful. For instance, Marvel Rivals reached 40 million players inside a couple of months of its launch, but a US-based team that worked on the sport was laid off. Battlefield Studios is one other example, which laid off employees despite Battlefield 6 being the best-selling game of 2025. After all, those that worked on underperforming games are much more more likely to see layoffs or closures, but even success is not necessarily a guarantee of job safety.
Nevertheless, Nintendo is not the only one which’s taken steps to reward its employees for fulfillment. Capcom raised employees’ salaries by a whopping 30% in 2022, while FromSoftware boosted theirs by 12% back in 2025. More recently, Pearl Abyss, the developer of Crimson Desert, gave an enormous bonus of about $3,400 USD to every member of its team after the sport sold 5 million copies. Atlus, the studio behind the wildly popular Persona JRPG series, also raised the salaries for its employees, with Atlus employees seeing a 15% boost to their salaries on average and an overall reduction in mandatory hours worked.
It’s hard to say what the longer term holds for the sport industry as an entire, but Nintendo has a history of attempting to do right by its employees, even when things have been hard. Former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata famously halved his own pay in an effort to help cover worker salaries. This happened back through the Wii U era of Nintendo, when the console notoriously struggled to sell and Nintendo’s future looked cloudy. Optimistically, things don’t turn out to be quite that dire again, however it’s good to know that Nintendo is searching for its employees.