With much of the industry suffering from widespread layoffs and thousands of jobs lost, Nintendo's most recent employee data shows that the turnover rate for their Japanese branch was just 1.9% from April 2024 to March 2025.

Nintendo of America's turnover rate was slightly higher but still quite low at 5.1%.

The data also showed that the average tenure (the average time that an employee remains at the company) was the highest in Japan at 14 years, and 10 years for Nintendo of America.

https://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-employee-retention-rate/

Nintendo are very proud of their ability to retain staff and bring positive creative culture to the next generation at a time when it is hard to create new big studios. You can see that success again with DK Bananza where they are able to successfully develop new people to become quality talent in director and producer roles. They see this as a key part of their success and plan to continue with it.

As a kid, I used to want to work for Nintendo because I was such a big fan of their games and IPs. As an adult, I'd want to work for Ninendo for the apparent job security and workplace quality of life compared to any Western for-profit company.

Never forget the time Iwata cut his own salary rather than lay off lower level employees when Nintendo had a bad fiscal quarter.

That kind of retention is exactly how you can manage to outlast your competition in the creative department for so long despite dabbling with the same portfolio of IPs for so long. Inspiring your next generation of talents to do even better after being coached by the cream of the crop of the industry.

Who honestly wouldn't want that ?
Anywoo, I'm so glad also that they managed to also bring their own stability to their acquisitions over the years which in turn transformed studios like Monolith Soft or Retro Studio into beacons of craftsmanship amongst their teams.

Someone here's going to mention that one time Nintendo of Europe laid off some staff in the late Wii U era or some Nintendo of A shifts the other year.....but that's like, what, two lay offs noted in 10 years give or take.

How many times has Microsoft laid people off from gaming in 2025 alone?

The most recent layoff in America  was noted but from what was reported most of it implicated contractors, while they also said they were downsizing their paid to contractors to search for full time position instead. 

So yeah, the Nintendo of Europe layoffs was the last biggest and most recent in their history. That was also the WiiU years, where the console was even more of a blimp in Europe than other territories.

My typical reaction to this sort of thing is to question how much of this relates to cultural differences and peoples relationship with work in Japan. For example people in west are way more likely to be whistle blowers and make issue of topics like crunch etc....

But seeing that they've got the highest average retention in Japan and also an average of 10 years in North America says they're absolutely doing something right

Plus I assume those numbers would include those sent to those 'quit already' room totals. I guess Nintendo doesn't have a windowless room

This is mostly a case of Japanese culture vs Western culture. One of the reasons Japan is a stagnant (but still stable) country is because nobody invests, everybody saves. Nintendo prefer to save money instead of hiring more staff, increasing wages, build more structure, etc

When a western company is doing a good job and earning lots of money, executives take the money and either invests in the company itself or other ventures. We saw that during pandemic. IT companies started hiring like crazy and/or gave very big salary increases to retain their staff

So when things are not fine (post pandemic) they will quickly cut the workforce if necessary, since there is not that much money saved to keep everyone in staff afloat 

There is enough people to hire, so they will never get out of staff when needed 

I read that as more of a comment on Western business culture than Nintendo.