Nintendo is reportedly planning to make their new building even bigger. Don’t worry, this is real news, we just have to explain.
Last April, Nintendo revealed that Kyoto chose them to take ownership of a parcel of land close to the headquarters itself in Kyoto, Japan. This property was itself owned by the city of Kyoto itself, so Nintendo must have made quite the effort to convince the city to have it.
In fact, this location is nicely located in between the Nintendo headquarters building and Nintendo Development Centre. That would be the larger building where Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Division, the group that comprises their many software developers, works.
This new building was dubbed Corporate Headquarters Development Center, Building No. 2,with a planned floor area of 38,000㎡, and plans to make a 72 meter, 12 floor building.
As reported by the Video Games Chronicle, that plan has now changed. They themselves cite a report from Nikkei, who claims that Nintendo is looking into making Corporate Headquarters Development Center, Building No. 2 even bigger, adding an unnamed number of floors.
There’s only so much floors that Nintendo will be allowed to make by Japan’s very stringent building codes, but the increase in floors is happening because of interesting reasons. Nikkei also reports that Nintendo hired 130 new graduates in fiscal year 2023. That’s half as many new staff than they hired in 2020.
Nintendo seems ready to catch up to the rat race in the console wars, and they have correctly identified that this is the time for them to do so. With the Nintendo Switch’s hardware showing its age, the next console really does need to match up or exceed the performance levels of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One to stay relevant.
We have reported on speculation on what kind of hardware Nintendo’s next console will have to get there. But that’s not all Nintendo has to do to keep up.
To avoid the painful struggles of teams failing to catch up to the necessary work during the Wii U era, Nintendo has to hire an increasing number of employees, with each console generation. The speculation some once had that the console industry was growing in a way that is unsustainable is no longer an excuse for Nintendo to stay small. If there are people in Nintendo who believe that, they still have to face the reality that they are now expected to deliver HD and even 4K graphics for their own first party games in the future. Subsequently, they are expected to provide new experiences enabled by newer tech.
Nintendo can stay ‘weird’ as they like, and as individualistic as they want, but as a competitor in the industry, they can’t ignore the basic norms of moving a new console generation. And so, Nintendo has to figuratively and literally grow.
