While most of the gaming industry has spent the past year handing out pink slips, Nintendo just handed out raises.
Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo's president, confirmed at a shareholder Q&A that the Kyoto-based company has raised base salaries for its employees by 10%. The statement came in response to a shareholder question about how Nintendo compensates its workforce given the company operates without a union. Furukawa's answer, via machine translation, was straightforward: “We think it is important to compensate our employees appropriately. We have taken steps such as raising base pay by 10%.”
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What Furukawa actually said, and what we don't know yet
Here's the thing: the statement came out of a shareholder meeting Q&A session, and an official English transcript has not been published yet. The initial reports circulating online are based on machine translations of Japanese social media posts summarizing what was said, which adds a layer of uncertainty to the specifics.
One notable question mark is timing. Some observers have pointed out that Furukawa's comment may be referencing the 10% base salary increase Nintendo implemented back in 2023, rather than announcing a brand new raise effective now. No timing details were specified during the Q&A, and without an official transcript it is genuinely hard to know whether this is fresh news or confirmation of a policy already in effect.
What is clear is that Furukawa was making a deliberate case to shareholders that Nintendo compensates its people at an appropriate level, and the 10% base salary figure was the concrete example he chose to make that point.
The industry context that makes this land differently
A 10% salary bump would be notable in any year. In the current climate, it hits differently.
The gaming industry has been through an extended stretch of mass layoffs. Sony, Microsoft, EA, and a long list of publishers and studios have all cut headcount significantly over the past couple of years. Against that backdrop, Nintendo announcing salary increases rather than redundancies is a genuine outlier.
Nintendo ranks fifth among Japanese game publishers in average salary, so the company is not leading the domestic market on compensation alone. But the combination of no significant layoffs, consistent game releases, and now a confirmed base salary increase paints a picture of a company managing its workforce with more long-term thinking than most of its peers.
Capcom has drawn similar praise in recent years for its approach to employee compensation and stability, and both companies are increasingly being held up as counter-examples to the boom-and-bust hiring cycles that have defined much of the western AAA space.
Why Nintendo's headcount model matters here
One factor worth keeping in mind: Nintendo's total employee count is significantly smaller than Sony or Microsoft. That makes company-wide salary increases more financially manageable compared to organizations with tens of thousands of staff spread across multiple divisions and geographies.
The key here is that Nintendo has historically been disciplined about not over-hiring during industry upswings, which means it has not needed to execute the kind of painful corrections that have defined its competitors' recent years. Fewer employees hired impulsively means fewer employees cut when the market shifts, and more room to reward the people who stayed.
That model is not easily replicable for a company like Microsoft with its sprawling gaming division, but it is worth noting as part of why Nintendo can make moves like this while others cannot.
For players, the downstream effect of a stable, fairly compensated workforce is hard to quantify but easy to feel. Teams that are not worried about their jobs tend to make better games. Whether you are deep into our Pokémon Pokopia humidity guide or hunting down the latest drops with our Pokémon EUIC 2026 Twitch Drops guide, the quality of Nintendo-adjacent titles reflects years of retained institutional knowledge.
Once Nintendo releases an official transcript of the shareholder meeting, the full picture of this salary announcement should become clearer. For now, check out more gaming guides while the industry waits for the official word from Kyoto.
