Reggie Fils-Aimé, the former president of Nintendo of America, recently shed some light on the way the company viewed mass layoffs during his time there. This comes at a time when mass layoffs are very common in the gaming industry.
Reggie Fils-Aimé was president of Nintendo of America from 2006 to 2019. During that time, he oversaw the success of consoles such as the Nintendo Wii and the launch of the original Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo’s Viewpoint on Layoffs Reaffirmed
Also during Reggie’s tenure, there was the less-than-stellar run of the Nintendo Wii U. Rather than immediately resorting to layoffs, the Nintendo Company Limited president at the time, Satoru Iwata, took a 50% pay cut in 2014 after Nintendo’s profits fell amid weak Wii U performance, and the reduction was set to last five months.
At the time, Iwata shared his belief that layoffs would hurt the company’s morale and weaken its ability to make great games.
During a recent visit to NYU, Reggie was interviewed about his time at Nintendo. As part of that discussion, Reggie discussed the company’s view on layoffs, saying that mass layoffs are not something the brand has ever been interested in.
“We thought about people from the standpoint that we never wanted to go through layoffs or mass eliminations of people. It just wasn’t in our DNA,” he said (via DualShockers).
At a time when Epic Games has laid off more than 1,000 people and several gaming projects have shut down due to quick returns on investment, Nintendo has avoided many of these pitfalls and continues to march to the beat of its own drum, pumping out exclusives and transitioning its largest properties into media juggernauts beyond the world of video games.
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