Nintendo retains 98% of its team while competitors lay off thousands of developers

Some people are always worse off during a crisis, and some are better off. Nintendo was able to put itself on the list of those who didn’t have to fire their team by the thousands.

Many players complain about the quality of graphics or performance of Nintendo consoles, but the studio itself is neither hot nor cold. Over the past year, the company has managed to retain as much as 98% of its employees — and this is an extremely successful indicator against the background of mass layoffs in the gaming industry.

The company released this data in a report for the period from April 2024 to March 2025. Against the backdrop of the general industry downturn, this makes it one of the few stable teams. In Japan, Nintendo’s staff turnover was only 1.9%, and in the US office it was —5.1%. This means that very few people left the company over the past year. And there were no massive layoffs inside the company at all.

The report also showed the average length of employment at Nintendo: over 14 years in Japan and about 10 years in the United States. For comparison, in many Western AAA studios, this figure is much lower, and even successful games do not guarantee stability for teams. We can say that most large studios will not be able to boast such a number.

Some recent examples: Virtuous recently laid off 300 employees although Oblivion Remastered was a success the other day released patch 2.3 for Cyberpunk. Also, the tech giant Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees half of which was in the gaming segment. A few months earlier, another major studio — Electronic Arts — laid off up to 400 people in its studios and canceled a shooter in the Titanfall universe. And at the end of winter Warner Bros. closes three studios and cancels Wonder Woman game despite spending $100 million. The scale of layoffs is enormous, and these are just recent examples excluding abbreviations in Meta or other similar companies.

Against this background, Nintendo’s example looks like an exception — the company keeps up with stable releases and recently successfully launched Switch 2. There are many questions about the console, in particular due to endless permanent bans for anything or «false» HDR. However, such decisions do not prevent Nintendo from remaining resilient amid the crisis.

Source: Tech4Gamers