Satoru Iwata was already a legend in the gaming community while he served as Nintendo president, and that legacy has only grown since his untimely death in 2015. He led the company through the highs of the Wii and DS era, but it’s his actions through the financial lows of the Wii U and 3DS generation that are perhaps best remembered these days. Game developers are now subjected to the constant threat of mass layoffs at major publishers, but Iwata took a different approach.
Iwata famously slashed his own salary by 50% in 2011, in response to poor financial results following the launch of the 3DS. Other executives at Nintendo took smaller pay cuts as well, but the company did not lay off employees even during a period of three back-to-back years of operating losses as both the 3DS and Wii U failed to gain ground.
In 2013, an investor asked Iwata why Nintendo was not restructuring in the wake of those poor financial results. “If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results,” Iwata argued, “employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
You may have seen that quote being resurfaced back in 2024, when mass layoffs were happening across the game industry, and it’s sadly still relevant now, because those layoffs have never really stopped.
“Some employers publicize their restructuring plan to improve their financial performance by letting a number of their employees go,” Iwata said in 2013, “but at Nintendo, employees make valuable contributions in their respective fields, so I believe that laying off a group of employees will not help to strengthen Nintendo’s business in the long run. Our current policy is to achieve favorable results by continuously cutting unnecessary expenses and increasing business efficiency.”
That policy doesn’t really seem to have changed since Iwata’s death, though there are caveats to keep in mind. Most notable is that Japanese labor laws make it much harder for employers to simply cut their workers, as compared with the at-will employment regulations in the US and some other Western countries.
I don’t want to put Nintendo on a pedestal here – the company certainly has other issues beyond its unwillingness (or inability) to lay off employees – but Iwata’s recognition of the human cost to the developers left behind when layoffs strike remains remarkable, especially as we continue to see devs cut by the hundreds and the thousands at publishers like Sony and Microsoft.