Nintendo has shared an update on how the company is handling the transition of the company towards their younger staffers.
Nintendo just published their latest Q&A with investors, with official translations so that both the meaning of the investors’ asking questions, and Nintendo’s answers, are clearly understood.
Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, had a short and straightforward answer when he said:
“The generational transition for developers is a very important issue for our company, but I believe it is progressing smoothly and I have no concerns at all. Nintendo is a company with many young, talented developers.”
Nintendo Fellow and board member Shigeru Miyamoto gave a more detailed explanation of how he sees things:
“Although I am the eldest director, I have no concerns and feel comfortable with my job. When it comes to developing new games, we have a system in place that allows younger developers to take the initiative, and I believe the handover is going smoothly.
However, those of the generation that took over have now become older themselves, so I would like to be able to hand things over to an even younger generation.
Personally, I find that if I’m not creating things, my days become boring and I become unable to create, so I’m involved with mobile apps like Pikmin Bloom and new media, such as visual content.
In some cases, I will continue to be heavily involved in game development, and I also want to be actively involved in fun ventures such as creating new IP that can gain interest worldwide.”
When one looks at Nintendo’s developer team, it may not be that easy to understand what Miyamoto is saying about the generations of developers at Nintendo. So we’ll explain it a bit.
Miyamoto himself is now 71 years old. Appropriately, Nintendo gave him a position as a Creative Fellow, and in this capacity, he is no longer involved in the day to day running of the company. That also means he isn’t tapped as the main consultant for Nintendo’s hardware and video games. As we have seen, he is instead directly involved in Nintendo’s movies and theme park attractions, comparable to the position Walt Disney placed himself in when he launched Disneyland in 1955.
But what most may not realize is many of the people who worked with Miyamoto are younger than him by about a generation. For example, Takashi Tezuka, who worked on the Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda with Miyamoto on the Famicom in the 1980s, is now 63.
Eiji Aonuma, who is often seen as the main man in charge of The Legend of Zelda franchise, is 61. Shinya Takahashi, a common presence in Nintendo Directs nowadays, is himself 60. And there are 50 year olds in Nintendo as well.
Yoshiaki Koizumi, who is credited with popularizing target locking 3D enemies when he came up with Z-targeting on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is 56. Shuntaro Furukawa himself, the current president of Nintendo, is 52. That makes him only one year younger than Super Smash Bros’ developer lead, Masahiro Sakurai. Even the producer of Splatoon, Hisashi Nogami, is 52 or 53 this year.
Nintendo’s aging developer staff is not a problem unique to the company. Indeed, the protections that Japanese law has placed for their workers has created a unique dilemma for Japanese companies, who have to pay high salaries and retirement packages for a lot of older and retired office workers.
For Nintendo to say that they are confident they are doing that transition well must indicate that they are aggressively hiring now, and it looks like the evidence is there for it. As of this year, they have 7,724 employees, compared to 7,317 employees in 2023 and 6,717 employees in 2022. While they are nowhere as big as Sony, that increased hiring rate should account for uncertainties if Nintendo deals with retirements, sudden exits of employees, if they have to lay off workers, etc.
